Below is what I wrote after last year’s State of the Union Address. Alas, this occasion has become such a redundant and irrelevant spectacle that I’ve decided to mark it this year and henceforth by publishing an equally redundant and irrelevant commentary.
It is noteworthy, though, that last night’s spectacle was compounded by Republican members of Congress showing more interest in taking pictures with cast members from the reality-TV show Duck Dynasty than in listening to the president of the United States.
This is not to say that the president did not give a great speech. He always does.
But nothing demonstrates the profound limitations of great presidential speeches quite like juxtaposing Obama’s famous Cairo speech in June 2009, in which he promised American leadership for a democratic transformation of the Middle East, with the bloody turmoil, fomented by Islamic extremism exposing American fecklessness, that pervades that region today.
More to the point, try juxtaposing the clarion call he made in his Address last year – in the immediate aftermath of yet another school shooting massacre – for modest gun-control legislation (namely universal background checks), with the fact that no legislation passed, compelling him to make that same clarion call again last night.
Not to mention that, just as he did again last night, he has called for an increase in the federal minimum wage in every one of these Addresses. Yet it remains at the same paltry rate of $7.25 it has languished at since 2009. Ditto his hollow mantra about closing Guantanamo Bay prison.
Therefore, here, word for word and image for image is what I wrote last year in “State of the Union Address: A Childish Spectacle,” February 13, 2013. And, trust me, it’ll prove every bit as informative as any original commentary you’ll find anywhere else today:
I have listened to enough State of the Union Addresses to know that they invariably amount to a triumph of style over substance. And nothing demonstrates this quite like the most memorable thing about President Obama’s address last year being not something he said, but a congressman yelling, ‘You lie.’
(“2011 State of the Union Address,” The iPINIONS Journal, January 26, 2011)
I have written many commentaries lamenting the “childish spectacle” politics in America has become. This is reflected in Republicans and Democrats doing everything from hurling schoolyard insults at each other to playing chicken over the budget with the country’s full faith and credit hanging in the balance.
But it’s an indication of just how childish a spectacle politics has become that President Obama himself felt constrained to lament as follows in his second inaugural address just weeks ago:
We cannot mistake absolutism for principle, or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate.
(Washington Post, January 21, 2013)
This is why I was so heartened when I read this morning that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia dismissed last night’s annual State of the Union (SOTU) Address as follows:
It has turned into a childish spectacle. I don’t want to be there to lend dignity to it.
(Huffington Post, February 13, 2013)
Hear, hear!
I am mindful, of course, that this is coming from a man who wore a Mickey Mouse cap to that very formal inauguration ceremony referenced above; that he sits on a court whose rulings these days seem borne of the same partisan divide that has turned Congress into such a childish spectacle; and that this is the 16th consecutive year (spanning Democratic and Republican presidents) Scalia has refused to lend dignity to this most august political spectacle of all, which probably says more about his temperament than the SOTU.
In any event, apropos of the address itself:
All presidents pad their addresses with feel-good proposals. And even the most popular presidents know that 95% of them will never be implemented.
(“2007 State of the Union Address,” The iPINIONS Journal, January 24, 2007)
Actually, in this respect, the president of the United States is rather like the president of a high-school senior class promising everything from better school lunches to more school holidays.
And nothing adds to the spectacle in both cases quite like the president’s supporters greeting each promise with jubilant ovations while his opponents remain firmly seated on their hands; notwithstanding that the promise in question is something both sides favor, but which both sides know does not even stand a snowball’s chance in Hell of ever being fulfilled. Not to mention the patent absurdity of presidents repackaging the same SOTU address to deliver each year.
This is why the spectacle of what Obama said last night was surpassed only by the spectacle of the way members of Congress reacted. And, insofar as SOTU addresses are concerned, it has always been thus. Which is why, to preserve their own dignity, presidents should revert to the nineteenth century practice of just mailing it in.
Related commentaries:
2011 SOTU address
2007 SOTU address
2013 SOTU address