Last week, President Barack Obama presented his State of the Union Address to the joint houses of Congress.
The annual speech lays out the sitting president’s agenda for the coming year and an appeal to the Senate and House of Representatives, liberals, moderates and conservatives to work together to do the people’s business. As the president cannot write new laws under the Constitution, the speech lays out the Executive Branch’s proposals of programs and laws in the hope that members of the Legislative Branch will enact them.
The tradition of a speech was established by George Washington in 1790, in the tradition of English kings who were invited to speak annually before Parliament in the House of Lords. Thomas Jefferson ended the practice in 1801, citing this “Speech From the Throne”-like event too monarchal — after all, we did fight a seven-year revolution to throw off royal trappings. He began the practice of a formal letter, to be read to senators and congressmen by the clerk, which continued until Woodrow Wilson resumed speeches in 1913.
Since the address hit the radio in 1923 and then television in 1947, the pageantry Jefferson so despised returned quickly. Rather than a simple policy speech asking for specific goals to be accomplished, programs to be funded and laws to be enacted, the State of the Union became a spectacle of partisan applause, presidential shout-outs to “everyday Americans” in the gallery and occasional cuts to shots of politicians and government officials with dour or exuberant facial expressions.
Presidents can be brilliant rhetoricians. Inauguration speeches, Abraham Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg, John F. Kennedy’s speech on lunar exploration at Rice University, Ronald Reagan’s sorrowful lament after the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster all rank as some of the most moving oratory in American history.
State of the Union addresses are rarely these things. Too partisan and too drudging for eloquence and inspiration, they make for fascinating theater and appeal to those of us self-described policy wonks, but they rarely make much impact on the lives of everyday Americans.
There is always an appeal by presidents to work across the aisle for the people, but this usually falls to the wayside once the president returns to the White House and Congress gets back to gridlock.
Instead, the State of the Union should chart a course of middle ground, listing policy goals that benefit as many Americans as possible. We voters should hold our men and women in Congress to the ideal of working together. If our representatives in Congress applaud bipartisanship during the speech, we should hold them to that afterward, rather than letting them return to fighting each other over minutiae and earning petty political points rather than do what’s right for us all.
A robust economy and a nation moving forward was not the product of one person in the White House, nor one party in Congress, but built by those of us putting aside our differences and working together to improve our communities and our nation. Our leaders should look to us for that inspiration and do the same in Washington long after the State of the Union applause fades to echoes.
