Now and then, some intrepid White House speechwriter will wage a quiet battle to kill the State of the Union Address as we know it — or at least shrink it so that it’s no longer a stylish piece of theatre.
Worrying that the annual speech has become stale, over the years the president’s allies have tried to shake it up. They have considered taking it out of the capitol and shifting it to the central states, shortening it by two-thirds or sticking to only one theme. But inertia will always prevail. No president wants to leave the pomp and ceremony, let alone millions of eyeballs trained on him as he walks through the House chamber following an eight-word sign: “Mr. President, President of the United States of America!
The position of the union may be strong or strong. But the State of the Union address is immutable. This is not going to change.
“This is one of the largest audiences of a presidential order,” said Kathleen Sebelius, cabinet secretary in Barack Obama’s administration. “With a captive audience and everyone tuning in at the same time, this is an opportunity to get across the themes and messages that are so important in setting the tone.”
Joe Biden’s speech Tuesday night is expected to mirror in many ways a speech delivered by every president since Ronald Reagan perfected the formula in the 1980s. All the old conventions will happen: call-outs to guests in the House Chamber, self-congratulatory lists of achievements and solemn promises to deal with what remains unfinished.
Legislators from the President’s party will stand and applaud throughout, while the opposition party will sit largely silent.
Nothing says that the address has to appear as such. Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution states only that the President “shall from time to time report to Congress the State of the Union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as may be necessary and expedient.”
In 1913, President Woodrow Wilson delivered his reports in person rather than in writing—reviving a tradition that had ended with John Adams in the 1800s. Personally, not everyone was happy to see the model making a comeback.
Sen. John Sharpe Williams of Mississippi said, “I am sorry to revive the old Federal custom of speeches from the throne, as told in Arthur Schlesinger’s three-volume history of the state of the Union.” “I am sorry for this poor and poor imitation of English royalty.”
Mistakes about the speech only grew as it took its modern form, sparking some rebellion among White House aides tasked with writing the talk each year.
In 1998, Jeff Shesol, a speechwriter at Bill Clinton’s White House, wrote an internal memo for short, tight-lipped speeches that focused on one key idea.
No one listened.
“I was essentially patted on the head and told, ‘You’re adorable,'” Chesol recalled.
If anything, bloat gone bad. Two years later, Clinton gave a speech that lasted an hour and a half—the longest State of the Union on record. At 9,000 words, Clinton’s speech was nine times longer than the first address given by George Washington in 1790.
“Speech has been an increasingly bankrupt practice for generations now,” Shesol said. “It has often been too vacuous and removed from the reality of our national and political life.”
Viewership is dwindling. Biden’s first State of the Union speech attracted 38 million viewers. In contrast, Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama and Donald Trump attracted 45 million to 52 million in their first addresses.
Attendance among Supreme Court justices, who are invited each year, is also falling. Chief Justice John Roberts complained in 2010 that the speech had turned into a “pep rally”.
“I’m not sure why we’re there,” Roberts said.
Not even his allies. Four of the nine judges left the event last year.
Former White House officials say one argument for dumping the speech in its current form is the growing political polarization in American life. Viewed from home, Americans are apt to see addresses along ideological lines that have calmed down. A study in 2020 found that the partisan divide in the US has grown more rapidly over the past four decades than in other large democracies, including the United Kingdom and Canada. In the late 1970s, a typical American rated his party 27 points higher than the other major party. By 2016, this figure had almost reached the 46 mark.
Past White House veterans say that in these fractious times, it is unrealistic to believe that the president can deliver a national message that would soften such divisions and truly unite the nation.
The speech “fundamentally reinforced division within the country, as opposed to broad support in the country for what a president wants to do,” the White House chief of staff under Clinton and later in Obama’s administration. said Leon Panetta, a cabinet secretary.
Did the Obama White House Consider Rethinking the Speech?
“every year!” said Cody Keenan, Obama’s former speechwriting director.
“Every year we’d sit there and say, ‘This is the year we’re going to do something small,'” Keenan recalled. “We even talked sometimes about trying to do it somewhere else: ‘What if we didn’t do it at the Capitol this year? What if we moved out in the country?'”
He told the staff an idea about giving a 2012 speech on the basketball field at The Ohio State University.
“[The television] networks have rightly said: ‘Well, we’re not going to carry it. Because if you do it in an arena somewhere with a bunch of Americans, it just becomes a political speech, And why would we move it to prime time?'”
The speech continued. Year after year, Obama, widely regarded as one of history’s great presidential speakers, has taken the stage and dished out a series of forgettable phrases to anchor a speech that has grown ever more cumbersome. His mantra in 2011 was “victory of the future”. Four years later, it was building “a new foundation” for the country.
Part of the problem may also be that the States of the Union try to do so many things at once: represent the president as president, appease interest groups who want to mention their favorite issues, and serve as cabinet secretaries. Satisfying those who insist on their preferences at least one mention.
“You felt like a winner if your policy was mentioned and a winner if it wasn’t,” said Sebelius, who heads the Department of Health and Human Services.
All of this can be maddening for the stylists in the speechwriting shop.
“Speaking purely as a writer, a terrible reason to put something into speech is that if we didn’t, so-and-so would go mad,” Keenan said.
Along came Trump. The question pundits had before his speeches was whether the president could deliver his State of the Union without the ferocity shown in his daily Twitter feed or launching into tangents, as he did in most of his scripted speeches. Will deliver to the address.
“Certainly, under Trump, there was a full through glass quality in the whole thing,” Schasol said. “There will be a regular, ordinary presidential reply for 50 or 60 minutes. And then, that evening, he would go on Twitter and do his job.
“The futility of the exercise has never been more apparent,” he said.
What is the future of the address? Panetta imagines what he would do if he were back in the White House. He said he would advise the president to cut the speech to 10 or 15 minutes — focusing on his most urgent priorities — and ask lawmakers to stay in their seats and just listen.
But others bet the speech is here to stay. The State of the Union is a forum for a politician to voluntarily relinquish.
Keenan said, “No White House is going to give it up.” “The future is what it has been for the past several decades. Nobody wants to write a 30,000-word letter and send it to Congress. So that’s what the speechwriters are doing for the time being.”