i have to defend millard fillmore. right. grover cleveland and millard are guys. so watch out. but two questions. so one was i always thought that benjamin franklin maybe was the epitome of the person who made us american. and i wondered if you might compare his contribution to webster's contribution in moving us in that direction. and the other question is, could you tell us a little bit about why webster wasn't more successful in all those attempts to become president. all right. yeah, i'm not sure that i'm competent to talk about. ben franklin. you know, my first book, i didn't have a whole lot of nice things to say about him, but you know ben franklin. yes. you're right, david. that that benjamin was to many people, the epitome of what an american was. and part of that was, as a kind of a masquerade. so when ben franklin went to europe, he presented himself in a way that he thought europeans thought america was dressed. so he went around with the coonskin cap at the. isn't that daniel webster? i don't know what for the coonskin cap, but he he had a coonskin cap. he wore old

now, we noted that when millard fillmore sitting 10,000 words, write in his address and bill clinton's averaging about, you know, 7000, it's ironic, one of the modern critiques of the state of the union address is that they're nothing more than long laundry lists of proposals. of course, the written addresses were far longer than those that have been delivered in person. the difference beyond the length is the expectation. the expectation of a address with it's commands that congress do things and increasingly overt appeal to partizanship. you know, these of the personal commitment that presidents are now expected to make in their state of the union very different than what we saw when they issued these addresses, writing. so the tradition even if they're are shorter than they're written is that, you know, the presidents lay before congress a very long list of policy proposals. the difference is that in the earlier addresses, it appeared that presidents were aware that they alone did not have the power to demand compliance with goals, whereas our our modern version suggests that you we