The tone of the address, meant as a bookend to a speech the president gave last week to Israeli lawmakers, reflected what the administration sees as the obstacles its diplomacy faces in pushing a peace agreement in the last months of Mr. Bush's presidency.
Speaking more broadly, another senior Bush administration official said the tone of the address "follows a line of attributing blame for things to outsiders, to the U.S".
The governor, who afterward met privately with the Roman Catholic bishop of Pittsburgh, Donald W. Wuerl, set the moral tone of his address early by talking longer than usual about his wife, Laura, who was at home in Austin.
On January 21st, one aide complained to Politico that the government shutdown had thrown the staff off its stride, and had put the theme and the tone of the address "in flux".
Note the intimate tone of her address to her great forebear, the poet Hafez, and how unselfconsciously she introduces a word that would have puzzled him, a word that conjures her love of the natural scenery of the Isle of Wight, "chine".
Her statement echoed the social justice tone of her first address at Downing Street last week.
So the tone of Tuesday's address may signify nothing about the Obama administration's future policy.
The tone of Mr. Obama's address, especially his emphasis on greater cooperation, and his vow to combat poverty, climate change and nuclear threats, scarcely presaged a new era of American bullying.
Indeed, notwithstanding the Realpolitik tone of Obama's address, his suggestion that the deployment of more U.S. troops would quicken the transfer of responsibility to the Afghani government and allow most U.S. troops out of Afghanistan in three years had an air of pure fantasy.
