President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address generated its share of headlines and memes. What this and other such addresses rarely do is generate serious policy debate.
This one certainly won’t. Instead, it showed the political class at its worst, with attention seekers getting what they craved and the president himself showing he’s as unserious about entitlement reform as the GOP.
There is a solution to some of this ridiculousness: end the televised speech.
There would still be a State of the Union message. But it would be a written report delivered to Congress without fanfare and most certainly without Bono.
Such a report was standard operating procedure for more than a century. As the Congressional Research Service notes:
President Thomas Jefferson changed the procedure followed by his predecessors with his first annual message (December 8, 1801). Instead of delivering an in-person speech, his private secretary delivered copies of the message to both houses of Congress, to be read by clerks in the House and Senate. Jefferson likened the oral delivery of the message to the British monarch’s “speech from the throne,” and felt it unsuitable to a republic. Some historians also speculate that Jefferson was a poor public speaker and did not want to deliver it orally, because his inaugural address had been barely audible and was unfavorably received. 10 Jefferson’s precedent of sending the yearly report as a formal written letter to Congress was followed throughout the 19th century (and part of the 20th century), until 1913. (emphasis added)
Who broke tradition? Woodrow Wilson, who also changed the message’s content:
President Wilson is also widely credited with expanding the scope of the annual message, transforming it from a report on the activities of the executive departments into a tool to draw widespread attention to the policies he supported. From 1914 to 1933, the message varied between being a written and a spoken message. President Franklin Roosevelt reestablished the personal appearance as a tradition with his 1934 State of the Union message, but he and several later chief executives also chose to deliver a written message in preference to a personal appearance on at least one occasion.
It’s highly unlikely that any future president will pass up the opportunity to look like a king on prime-time TV. Or that members of Congress won’t use the opportunity to make themselves the center of attention.
But anyone who thinks statecraft is a serious business should call for the speech/media circus to end and the written report to return…so everyone in official Washington can get back to work.
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The best and easiest way to improve the SOTU, is to elect better Presidents.
Nah, the best way, is just to cancel the entire event – blah,, blah,, blah!!!!!!!