Years ago, during the long-forgotten administration of George H.W. Bush, I looked in on a friend of mine who had been “tasked”— the military jargon was just then creeping into civilian life – with writing the president’s State of the Union address.
The speech was a few days off, and my overworked friend looked glum. He sat at his huge desk in the Executive Office Building surrounded by stacks of briefing papers, some as tall as two feet, that had been shipped in from every corner of the government.
When I made a sympathetic comment, he waved it away.
“You have no idea,” he said.
I asked him what kind of guidance he was getting from the president’s many advisers.
He looked up through heavy-lidded eyes. “They say I’m supposed to make it ‘thematic.’” He shivered visibly.
Thematic! Brrrrrrrrrrr! It is a word to chill a former speechwriter’s heart, even across the decades. People pull out “thematic” when they’re groping for a fancy word to obscure the fact they’ve run out of things to say. Think of the way literary critics call a novel “luminous” when they really just mean “good.”
In the language of speechwriters, the opposite of thematic is the compound noun “laundry list.” A laundry list is a speech that simply ticks off a number of unrelated items—policies, issues, achievements—without apparent method. When a boss tells a speechwriter to go thematic, he really means: Don’t write a laundry list.
Every year, both phrases are overused as the president prepares to deliver his State of the Union address, as President Trump will tonight. Every year we are told the SOTU—we do like our acronyms in Washington—will be thematic. Every year the president gives us a laundry list.
He has no choice. The SOTU isn’t really about the state of the country. If it were, the president could settle the issue in a few words: My fellow Americans, the state of the union is [fill in the blank] good, confident, expectant, terrific, better in some places than others—even luminous, if that’s what he wants. The speech isn’t about the state of the country because (if you’re easily shocked you might want to skip to the next paragraph) the president can’t do much about the state of the country.
No, the SOTU is about the state of the government—the executive branch of the federal government, to be precise. About this the president can do a great deal. Those stacks of briefing papers that surrounded my glum speechwriting friend have only grown in the intervening years, as the government’s capacity and passion for meddling has exploded. Every agency and department of the federal government lobbies to shoehorn a mention of its favorite policies into the biggest presidential speech of the year. And because the federal government is a vast, hydra-headed, restless, infinitely ambitious hot mess, no speechwriter, gazing at its sprawling work, will be able to wrap a theme around it.
Hence the laundry list. Before his postprandial audience of snoozy, half-drunk politicians (plus the year’s hand-picked American hero, whoever he or she may be, sitting in the gallery next to the first lady) the president scatters the work of government like feed corn in the barnyard: innovative programs, long-overdue initiatives, blue-ribbon commissions, revolutionary reforms, desperately needed tax credits, common sense regulations, one right after another, government without end.
For a long time, the laundry list seemed to be a built-in rhetorical weakness of the SOTU. It took Bill Clinton to figure out how to make it pay. His SOTUs were endless; they were also the most successful SOTUs of the modern presidency, measured in TV ratings and poll numbers. Clinton knew that Americans pretended to dislike the federal government—his famous declaration that “the era of big government is over” came in a SOTU. He also knew that Americans cherished the federal government’s comforts and blandishments.
So he aimed each item of his laundry list squarely at some micro-constituency. For those worried about disorder in the public schools, he offered grants for school uniforms. For those with a frustrating, congested commute, he offered new housing vouchers to buy a residence nearer to the workplace. If you thought your kids were watching inappropriate TV shows, the president offered to outfit your TV with a doodad called the V-chip.
Sooner or later, as the president droned on for 50, 60, 70 minutes, any viewer, however disengaged, was going to hear the president mention a difficulty peculiar to his or her own circumstance, and then announce a solution just for you.
Clinton’s approach, as I say, was wildly successful, and his successors, both the Republican and the Democrat, adopted it as their own. The trouble was that a SOTU put together and delivered in this way gave the mistaken impression that the federal government was omni-competent. No problem was too niggling for its healing attention, every frustration could be nationalized. The era of big government being over was over before it began.
It may be that tonight our current president will decline to continue this kind of SOTU and come up with an approach all his own. Whatever their other merits, our last three presidents have been alert, conscientious executives who seemed interested, to varying degrees, in the workings of the government they presided over. Trump exhibits none of these qualities. We’ll see if a man with no curiosity about the demands of his job will be able to talk about them for more than an hour.
I’m terrible at predictions, so I won’t guess what the president will say tonight. But I know what I’d like him to say. It’s in keeping with his willy-nilly destruction of excruciating Washington institutions that were once thought unassailable. The full-dress, televised presidential press conference and the White House Correspondents’ Dinner have already been permanently altered or sunk into insignificance under Trump, and may eventually be done away with altogether. Why not the State of the Union?
After the chimplike ovation that Republican lawmakers will no doubt give him, the president could begin his speech tonight by pointing out that it has no constitutional warrant. Article 2, Section 3, requires the president “from time to time [to] give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.”
That’s it. You don’t have to do it once a year, and you certainly don’t have to do it in person. You don’t even have to do it in prime time.
Before Woodrow Wilson, presidents wrote out their “information of the State of the Union” and shipped it to Congress. None had thought to deliver it aloud, in the flesh, as a major event in front of the entire Congress obsequiously assembled. Wilson couldn’t pass up the chance to strut. Who wants to take Woodrow Wilson—an elitist, racist, would-be totalitarian; also a Democrat—as a healthy example of anything?
“Members of Congress, and my fellow Americans,” Trump will say, his hand rising and falling daintily, “This is my first State of the Union address. It is also my last. Sit down, Nancy. I’m not resigning. But I am putting an end to this ridiculous exercise, which in the hands of my predecessors has gone from minor annoyance to national insult.
“From now on,” he will continue, “if you want to know what your president is doing, you will find me in a far more dignified and informative setting. The handle is @realDonaldTrump.”
