It was kind of like listening to Nickelback on Muzak.

President Donald Trump spent an hour addressing a joint session of Congress last night, speaking in complete sentences, not drooling or calling people names (not specific people, anyway) —- and saying pretty much the same divorced-from-reality pap he’s been saying since he began running for President in 2015.

The first take is less that he’s turned over a new leaf than that he’s launched an experiment: If he says the same things in a different way, does that make a difference?

From the Wall Street Journal:Trump shifts tone but not policies in speech to Congress

The speech went over fine: CNN’s snap polls showed 78% of people responded positively to it. But as former Democratic Rep. John Dingell tweeted:

Forty days since the notably strident inaugural address that set a nasty, confrontational (but unsurprising, given his campaign) tone for his presidency, Trump was on his best behavior.

But he was selling all the same ideas America generally hasn’t been buying, was wrong or lying almost every minute on average, and unveiled a particularly racist new gambit, a special government office devoted specifically to victims of crimes committed by illegal immigrants, who actually commit fewer felonies than native-born citizens.

President Trump Outlines Presidential Vision

He still is wrong, and out of step with the American people, on health insurance. Despite the best efforts of Trump’s party to make it so, Obamacare isn’t collapsing. It’s insuring 20-million plus people, and would have covered millions more had the Supreme Court not let Texas, Florida and other Republican states opt out of the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion.

And his plan is still going to call for a tax cut for millionaires, which will take away the dollars needed to subsidize health care for middle-class families who don’t get coverage at work. (There is already a tax subsidy — the largest in the tax code — to subsidize the coverage that most workers get from employers).

If the money isn’t there, individual-market insurance coverage won’t be there. GOP plans to paper this over by promoting policies that cover much less, and cost somewhat less to buy, won’t wash. Nonpartisan estimates have as many as 30 million people losing their insurance, with tens of thousands dying as a result, who will be just as dead if the president kills off their coverage in a moderate tone of voice.

He still wants to build a wall on the Mexican border. Just, in the spirit of the night, he refrained from saying that Mexico will pay for it. Or that Hillary Clinton will be locked up inside it.

He still favors protectionism, which will undo the modest contributions his still-unreleased tax cut plan makes to growth.

He still claimed most domestic terrorists are immigrants, when those responsible for about 90% of terrorism deaths on U.S. soil since Sept. 11, 2001, are native-born U.S. citizens.

Trump's Address to Congress in Three Minutes

He’s still chockablock with nonsense economic numbers, including a stat on work-force participation that asserts senior citizens are out of the workplace because they can’t find jobs. No, Mr. President, they’re retired. There’s a difference.

He’s still full of it on crime, where murder is still half of 1990s levels even with the spike in Chicago. He’s still full of it on drugs, where he quietly painted a picture of cartels stamping across the U.S. landscape that is, to be as polite as the president tried to be, total nonsense. And he still signed a bill yesterday designed to make it easier for mentally-ill people to buy guns.

He still thinks cheap natural gas has nothing to do with the coal industry’s problems, and lacks any appreciation of the role coal plays in climate change.

Will Trump’s new approach work?

Maybe, for a short time.

Trump still hasn’t released his budget, which is reported to slash everything from the State Department to the Environmental Protection Agency to pay for a dubious military buildup. He hasn’t released his tax plan, which will likely propose cutting trillions of dollars in revenue over the next decade without any real offsetting spending cuts. See how the middle class likes a corporate-skewed tax cut — especially if, as Oxford Economics predicted yesterday, its stimulative effect wears off before the next election.

His party’s health-care plan is likely to slash Medicaid, and might try to convert Medicare to a voucher plan, partly to skirt the fiscal damage ACA repeal would do to Medicare. See how Florida likes them apples. Or how the Midwest responds when manufacturing unemployment rises a little, as it has for the last half-decade, but comes in way short of Trump’s sales pitch.

Remember, the reason people hate Nickelback is the insincerity of its pandering. There are actually studies on that! All of Trump’s yadda yadda about crime, jobs, health care and more, because it’s so divorced from lived experience, is just so much Nickelback.

And besides, we know he’ll blow up in public soon, undoing the baby step he took toward statesmanship last night.

I come back to this: Voters vote in the short run and weigh results in the long run — and the long run will arrive before November 2020. Whether Trump speaks softly or not.