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In January 2015, the United States’ gross exports will be the sum of about $200 billion and 60 minutes of presidential bloviating. The State of the Union address is nothing if not nauseating drama, plump with pomp and unnecessary circumstance. It doesn’t need to exist. Article II of the U.S. Constitution does not, in fact, read: “The president shall from time to time give to the Congress a good ol’ fashioned tongue-lashing in person, and recommend to their Consideration such measures as he shall judge politically advantageous, rhetorically appealing, and made-for-TV, since we, the authors of this noble Document, foresee a day in which the president shall use his office to audition for a part in an Aaron Sorkin movie.”
The President “shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union,” the Constitution actually states, “and recommend to their Consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.” In other words, a memo.
What the democracy needs more: press conferences. What the democracy needs less: press spectacles. The force of eloquence is necessary in times of war and crisis. It is far less useful in times of fiscal deficit and programmatic incompetence across multiple agencies of the federal government. One calls for transformational leadership. The other calls for accountability and an honest day’s work. We find ourselves in need of the latter. Using the State of the Union address as a table-setter to accomplish it is akin to having the staff of the Four Seasons arrange expensive dishware for Taco Tuesday.
“[State of the Union addresses] have always been important moments for presidents to lay out where they think the country is, and where it needs to go,” David Plouffe said in 2012. Not so. Jefferson, bless his heart, “… was concerned that [they were] too similar to the British monarch’s ritual of addressing the opening of each new Parliament with a list of policy mandates,” and he blew the whole thing off. He turned it into a well-written pen-pal letter. It was thanks to Wilson that the beast came back, and now the night is an ego-stroking party of Trumpian proportions. George Will agrees.
“[It] has become a tiresome exercise in political exhibitionism, the most execrable ceremony in the nation’s civic liturgy, regardless of which party’s president is abusing it,” he wrote last January. “You worship bipartisanship? There is not a dime’s worth of difference between the ways the parties try to milk partisan advantage from this made-for-television political pep rally.”
Criticizing the State of the Union address as an institution is not a cause celebre. But it is a bit of an underground movement, vogue among some in “the punditocracy,” Doug Mataconis writes. In addition to him and Will, there’s Charles Cooke and Glenn Thrush. Businessweek called out the speech’s historically empty promises. Political strategist Ed Rogers, writing in The Washington Post, called out its empty applause lines.
Not everything about the State of the Union address is empty, though. It is, after all, full of itself.
“After the sixth time, I suspect that I’m a little more relaxed and a little better at it than I was the first time out,” President Obama says in a “behind the scenes” video previewing Tuesday’s ceremony. The two and a half minute clip has more dramatic piano than a promo spot for a major sporting event. “But you never get completely used to it.”
Please, Mr. President, end it before somebody does.
