lol @ above comment

I distinctly remember reading in Vicente Fox’s REVOLUTION OF HOPE (a book I seem to refer to often) how during the Mexican President’s State of the Union address…if the old “PRI” stalwarts didn’t yammer on for at least two+ hours, the assembled members of Mexico’s Parliament wouldn’t take their leader seriously.

Ditto, likely, for all Congresses of the former Communist Party of the Soviet Union or any of its satellite countries, like here in the former Czechoslovakia.

Fox was indeed a strange creature — neither fish nor fowl.

He rose through the ranks of the corporate world as the country manager for Coke in his native land, and suddenly became very involved with politics somewhere along the midpoint of his business career.

At Coca-Cola, he became accustomed to more “American” ways of running the show, and when he was elected to his nation’s highest executive post he was doggone committed to usher in not just revolutionary speech but revolutionary *deeds.*

One of them was become more curt and brief in his official utterances and statements, including his State of the Union address, which he capped at 30 minutes, to the astonishment of his onlookers and the television/radio networks.

Needless to say, it took his audiences and interlocutors a long time to recover from the shock.

Also needless to say — and knowing Vicente Fox — he silently reveled in the schadenfreude. Ultimately, he won out…

Check the book out, in any event, for a nice biographical read.