[Daniel_LaFleur]

One of the great things about FIRST is that it gives the students real world experiance.

The speech by the Secretary of Commerce is no different. Many times when a politician speaks he has an agenda or political message he wants to get out.

In this case his motivation seems fairly straight forward -- His job is to promote commerce in the US. To do so, he needs to portray a picture of economic expansion. To do otherwise would be counter productive. Imagine if he, instead of talking about US success, talked about the US economy tanking (hypothetically). If he did so, it would be front page news in the New York Times and Dow Jones would probably lose 200 points. So he will not talk poorly about the economy unless it is absolutely needed.

FIRSTers have the advantage of being able to listen to these politicians and learning how to filter the retoric from the substance.