President speaks for one hour and forty minutes at a casino in Mount Pocono, abandons the affordability talking points, and spends most of the speech on insults.

The President, on Tuesday, traveled to the Mount Airy Casino Resort in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, for what the White House billed as the kickoff of an economic-agenda tour ahead of the midterms. The speech ran one hour and forty minutes.

Hon. One hour and forty minutes is a long speech. For reference, the Gettysburg Address ran two minutes. The State of the Union runs an hour, give or take. A Springsteen concert, with intermissions, runs three hours. The President, on Tuesday, gave a speech that was closer to a Springsteen concert than to a State of the Union. Without the harmonica.

The speech, in its first ten minutes, addressed affordability. The administration’s stated topic. The reason for the trip. The press release, on the record, used the word affordability nine times. The President, on the record, used it twice.

After the first ten minutes the speech departed the affordability material entirely. By the half-hour mark the President was on personal grievances against three named cable hosts. By the forty-five-minute mark he was on the previous administration. By the hour mark he was on a story about a real-estate deal in 1989 that did not, on the public record, occur in 1989. By the hour-twenty he was on a description of the size of the crowd in the room, which the fire marshal, on the record, capped at 1,800.

The wire-service ledes, by Tuesday night, did not mention affordability. The wire-service ledes mentioned the insults. The wire-service ledes are how 80 percent of the country reads what the President said, because 80 percent of the country does not watch one-hour-forty-minute casino speeches.

I have been a waitress for thirty years. I have watched a good number of customers come in for the soup of the day, complain that the soup is too hot, ask for a glass of water, and then spend forty minutes telling me the story of their second wife. The soup goes cold while the story goes on. The story is not, in the end, about the soup.

The midterms are next year. The soup is supposed to be the topic. The story, on Tuesday in Pennsylvania, was not about the soup.

That ought to concern you.