State of the Union, Do I Sense Frustration?

Sometimes I listen to the State of the Union speech, mostly I read it. I like reading anything that carries importance. It is better internalized and I see the nuances to the writing. This year I noticed a kind of frustration evident in a choice word used in the speech. Now, I know our President must be very dissatisfied with the garbage "Health Care Reform Bill" which in my opinion should be trashed as a watered down document not worth the paper it is written on, and that goes to for the bill that was supposed to reform our broken financial system. That bill is even worse. It does nothing to address the root cause of the financial meltdown. But without going into detail here, I sensed the President's frustration when I read this:

We should have no illusions about the work ahead of us. Reforming our schools, changing the way we use energy, reducing our deficit — none of this will be easy. All of it will take time. And it will be harder because we will argue about everything. The costs. The details. The letter of every law.


Of course, some countries don't have this problem. If the central government wants a railroad, they build a railroad, no matter how many homes get bulldozed. If they don't want a bad story in the newspaper, it doesn't get written.

The word "problem" should have been "process". To use problem is to imply that the messy democratic process is a problem and that dictatorship is preferable to solving problems.

It should be noted that this was a very poor choice of a word here.