Tonight is President Biden’s second State of the Union address (his first address to a joint session of Congress in 2021 was technically not a SotU because he had just been inaugurated). Most likely it will be far too long, constantly interrupted by Stalin-esque continued applause, and full of total nonsense. Biden will call out people in the audience that are brought in specifically for the purpose of being used as political pawns, he will make promises that everyone will forget about 5 minutes later, and he will occasionally go off-script to make him feel down-to-earth. The speech will be phony, the reception will be obsequious, and the TV coverage will be wall-to-wall.
How do I know this? Because every State of the Union address is exactly the same song-and-dance. Can you tell that I don’t like this “tradition”?
Why do we even have a tradition of these addresses in the first place? This answer is an easy one: it is required by the Constitution. In Section III of Article II, we see the genesis of the idea:
He shall from time to time 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…
As you can see, nothing here details the specific form of the State of the Union, only that it should be given to Congress by the Executive “from time to time”. Our first two Presidents, George Washington and John Adams, chose to give the mostly perfunctory address in-person, but their successor Thomas Jefferson ended this approach and opted for a written message instead. Jefferson rightly saw the in-person address to a joint session of Congress as smacking of monarchy and all-too-European for his democratic tastes. For the next century, the written report was the form this annual message took. Until, that is, Woodrow Wilson came in and ruined everything (as usual).
Wilson returned to giving the address in person in 1913, using it to promote the office of the President over the Congress, present himself as a centralizing leader, and push his favored radical policies. Like so many of his other ideas, Wilson’s revival of the monarchical verbal form was an exercise in self-aggrandizement from a man who thought he was God’s gift to America. Unfortunately – again, like so many of his other ideas – this one stuck.
Later leaders brought the address to the radio, television, and internet, further expanding its reach and emphasizing its importance. A tradition of opposition rebuttals to the speech evolved over time, and now there are several post-SotU speeches by opposition figures, members of the President’s own party, and random non-politicians.
Another malign development in the entertainment aspect of the annual address came under Ronald Reagan, who was the first to bring specially-selected guests to the show and reference them directly in his speech. This began in 1986 with four special guests and has exploded to the point where it feels like an episode of Hollywood Squares. Seemingly every single policy idea has to be accompanied by a human avatar in the Congressional gallery. This use of people as political pawns is quite grotesque, especially as the practice has evolved.
The whole spectacle is overwrought, canned, and incredibly boring to watch. Nothing of interest happens, most policy prescriptions declared from on high by the President never come to pass, and the whole evening is elongated interminably by the constant forced applause. The State of the Union was never intended to be a monarchical gala, but a rote and unspectacular recitation of the actual issues facing the nation. The evolution of this business-like requirement into a televised event has been bad for the country; it has coincided with the rampant growth of the federal government, the creation of the ‘imperial presidency’, and the rise of politics as entertainment.
The next President should return to the small-d democratic tradition of the 19th century and eschew an in-person State of the Union, choosing a written message in its place. End this monarchical scourge on our body politic, and you’ve got my vote.
1) Based on your writing to date, I don’t think you’d vote for any Democrat who tosses the in person SOTU. Clarity about such things will earn you more respect then not.
2) Now that you’ve actually seen it – including the unfortunate loss of decorum the GOP flaunted and Biden’s well timed sparring (which further pushes back on the mental decline narrative) do you still think its a colossal waste of time?Report
Aviator glasses do not fix the President’s drug problem, they merely conceal his oculatory changes. His drug problem doesn’t fix his cognitive decline. His cognitive decline does not excuse the loss of the nuclear codes (now that’s two presidents in a row).
Malarkey doesn’t happen out of nowhere.Report
Like Phillip H, I don’t think there is a Democrat you would ever vote for but for some reason, you don’t want to admit it. That being said, I agree with you that the modern SOTU is very much a part of the polientertainment complex but I don’t see any President going back to just sending Congress a bunch of notes.* FWIW, I did not watch but enjoyed hearing Biden direct the Republicans off the cliff like a bunch of lemmings and he is very good at responding to heckler’s vetoes.
*I feel the same way about the Presidential Debates as well because they are extremely scripted affairs but I always receive notices of shock and horror from fellow liberals when I state you don’t have to watch the debates. As far as I can tell, a lot of my fellow liberals were teacher’s pets and can’t quit the habit including the idea that their seventh grade social studies teacher might be wrong that watching the debates is a very important civic responsibility.Report
No debate I ever watched swayed my vote either way.Report
Same. I’m much more likely to be persuaded by engagement on this forum than any political theater I see or hear on mass media.
N.b., not everyone engages in forae like Ordinary Times with a diversity of viewpoints and a premium placed on merits-based argument. N.b.b., even here, minds don’t change all that often.Report
You’re apparently more likely to listen to backseat drivers here, than you are to listen to subject matter experts. When they come to you appealing for help that you promised, you tell them to go suck a fig.
I’m not going to cite the post you made boasting about denying Women The Right To Choose.Report
Saul may well (correctly) chide me for engaging with this, but I feel compelled to ask: what the actual fish are you talking about?
(I know, showing my age by using that euphemism. I always liked it.)Report
ordinary-times.com/2021/10/27/vaccination-employer-mandates-religious-exemptions-oregon-attorney-lawyer-law-legal/
Failure to listen to subject matter experts — in this case nurses, on the relative likelihood of a vaccine causing deaths and near-fatalities. They deal with approved drugs that get pulled because of undisclosed side-effects every day.
Although I’m quite sympathetic to your claims about “time and resources being wasted,” I somehow suspect that there’s been at least one call that you could have helped with, that you screened out unfairly (our hospital has about 10% IT workers, who were nearly all remote throughout the COVID19 crisis, and continue to be remote workers. The accommodation needed is incredibly slight — “do nothing and let the person keep working.”).
You also allowed your advice to be colored by your prior convictions — it’s quite possible that hospitals “don’t really care” about having everyone vaccinated, and would simply “rubber stamp” anyone with a decent “religious objection.” [Across the country, this has varied from: “if you cite a religious objection, you’re getting fired as a troublemaker” to “we are desperate for anyone, and will take anyone, fill this form out and we’re not going to even complete the due process.”]
“I’m quite sure that I’d be doing the opposite of a public service if I used my Super Attorney Powers to help people avoid vaccination.”
–Yep. “I think that people do not deserve the right to choose whether or not to take untested medication, with lethal side effects.”
“Lethal side effects” Sources Cited Upon Request, complete with a priori reasoning.Report
Ah. So when you said “women,” you meant “nurses,” or more broadly, “vaccine skeptics.” That wasn’t intended to be deceptive or sexist or anything else objectionable, surely.
I didn’t deny them the right to choose. I declined to help them acquire the ability to make a consequential choice without bearing the consequences.
These people were always free to seek out another lawyer who felt differently about the issue, or to seek exceptions or accommodations to the rule in other ways. They were always free to decline the vaccine, if they felt strongly enough about it to risk losing their jobs.
Nurses are not epidemiologists either by training or by experience. Their subject matter expertise lies elsewhere. If you’re going to claim I ignored subject matter experts and was therefore dangerously wrong, you could at least accuse me of ignoring experts from the relevant field of expertise. And I’m not going to take the bait to debate the safety of the very safe COVID vaccines. This is already way off topic for this thread, and the subject has been well exhausted elsewhere.
Good luck in your senior year.Report
“I’m not denying you the right to believe anything you want to believe. All I’m saying is, any decently-run place would turn you out on your ear. That’s not a ban! That’s not a mandate! That’s not government action! That’s just privately-run businesses making a private decision that they don’t want to associate with transgender people!”Report
Things that are different turn out to not be alike.Report
Deceptive? sure.
Sexist? not really. I didn’t accuse you of mansplaining.
As your conduct is unconscionable (and I had to write a dandy fine essay about it, yes sir), I believe I’m well within my rights to call you out on it.
You declined to help them assert their constitutional right to Freedom of Conscience and Belief. (That this was likely, in some cases, to be overriden by the employer’s right to “ask people to do things in the workplace” is rather immaterial. I believe as a matter of conscience and faith that putting roadblocks (including financial ones) between the State and My Body is a fundamental good deed. My body is my choice.)
“Were always free to seek out” — this is you being a stump. A person who merely felt like this was a problem of their own conscience would have passed them onto someone else. “I won’t participate in killing your baby, but you have the right to healthcare. Jen in Wichita will fill the scrip.” (I’d further stipulate that asking someone to go to another pharmacist ought to come with the moral obligation to help them get there, if one is imposing undue hardship. “I don’t have a car” ought not to mean “I can’t get an abortion.”)
As a stump, you are guilty of aiding and abetting the loss of my Right To Choose My Own Health Care. That doesn’t actually make you the hero.
It’s funny you’re talking epidemiologists. I’d be talking protein-folding chemists (S1 and S2 should sound familiar) — but then again, you’re probably convinced that no one has died from the vaccine, despite the published scientific evidence.Report
You know my real name. Report me to the state bar if you think I’ve violated a law or a rule of legal ethics.
Also, how do you know I didn’t refer these people to other attorneys? (Because when I knew of one willing to take those kinds of cases, I did.)Report
I took from the tone of your essay that you were unlikely to be referring people to others, as you saw your crisis of conscience being broad enough to interfere with other people’s decision-making. (Perhaps a more charitable explanation would be “I decided that wasting everyone’s time and money on fruitless religious objections was not in my interest, nor my potential clients.” I see rebuking governmental interference in my private life as worth spending money on.)
I do beg your pardon for thinking worse of you than you deserve.Report
Where is this “dandy fine essay” of which you speak? There’s nothing here that merits that description.Report
The dandy fine essay is my religious objection to the CDC’s mandate.Report
Burt, I think your comment is more applicable a few years back than now. The diversity of commentary has, in my opinion, degraded. It also seems to me that the commentariat is more likely to be more reactionary to some POV, with commentators dismissing certain viewpoints than actually considering their them.Report
Some days I think this sentiment is correct. Today I was feeling optimistic.Report
After the above exchange, today I’m feeling much more like you.Report
“It was fine when it was Jaybird who had six people screaming that he was a horrible wrong person, but when someone talks back to me, that’s a problem!”Report
I’m coming around to an acceptance of the politainment aspect.
The more I discover about American history and how raucous and chaotic it was, and how comfortable the founders and icons of our history were with radical structural shifts and confrontational battles, the more I think of our era, the post WWII New Deal/ Reagan era as an aberration.
I’m NOT suggesting that someone beat Margorie Taylor Greene with a cane on the House floor.
But we live in a world where most people get their news from social media or cable tv or tabloids, all part of the politainment ecosystem. We don’t live in the world of a Kennedy/ Nixon debate where three news anchors acted as gatekeepers for what the entire nation was to talk about.
Whether its better or worse I can’t say but Biden isn’t running against a Nixon or even a Reagan, he’s running against a carnival barker with a backing chorus of howler monkeys, where memes and sh!tposts are tools of politics.
I like that he didn’t seem to be shocked or thrown off script by the shrieking hecklers but gave as good as he got.Report
Agreed, and anyone pushing the cognitive incapacity canard looks absolutely idiotic in wake of his performance yesterday evening.Report
I also thought he acquitted himself pretty well.Report
It’s always a pleasure to agree. Also I thought Vice President Harris looked amazing and her demeanor and vibe when she stood to clap and back Biden up at various points was pitch perfect.Report
I see Biden as an incredible lucid person with great political instincts. You see Biden as an incredible lucid person with great political instincts. Many people seem to see him as doddering old man and a clown no matter what evidence is presented to them. I also think that Biden is still the best person to take on Trump or DeSantis but lots of people on our side still have the fantasy that the best way to beat Trump is to have an educated wonk show how smart she/he is compared to Trump. Nothing will change this opinion.Report
Would you listen to subject matter experts on this point? There are people that make their living diagnosing drug problems in Heads of State.
Would you listen to someone who’d diagnosed GWB as having DTs?Report
I’m NOT suggesting that someone beat Margorie Taylor Greene with a cane on the House floor.
I would, however, put up good money to promote a mud-wrestling match between her and Lauren Bobert. No guns, though.Report
That is fair but don’t pretend it is a great civic responsibility to watch the SOTU and debates because your seventh grade social studies teacher said soReport
In my darker moments I think we are drifting into an American Troubles, a sort of cold-occasonally-hot struggle for the future.
In this struggle all the tools of politics are used, from jurisprudence to legislation to media in all its forms from traditional to social, with violence always lurking in the shadows.
I don’t welcome it but liberal democracy has never been created any other way, and something something watering the tree.Report
“Divorce or War” is the phrasing I kinda prefer.
There are 73 million Boomers, according to Google. 72 million Millennials.
When there are 60ish million Boomers, we’re going to see a *LOT* of interesting dynamics change.Report
Old Boomers aren’t turning their golf carts into technicals to fight a war. They’ll trick out their AR 15’s with all the merch so they can talk very loudly about what they would have done in their 20’s.
Do the 20-40’s want war? Not really and they are the ones who will matter a lot more. Boomers gonna move on as we all do. There will be all the dynamics as the spoiled boomers get really crotchety that is for sure.Report
I think that the Boomer departure from the workforce is more likely to lower the temperature on a number of issues, even as it strains the federal budget.Report
Yeah, but you’re not going to do either. Americans have an appetite for the pageantry of civil conflict, not the reality.Report
Eh, something like “quiet quitting” might find its way wandering through the snake.Report
There is a lot of money to be made and votes to get by talking about war. There is very little money to be made by the war proponents with an actual low grade civil war. So it’s not going to happen.Report
And in my sunnier moments I think you’re right, that the Proud Boys and 3 Percenters and MAGA chuds are really just full of hot air and bluster.
In any case, the Republicans won’t be defeated with appeals to civility and decorum but by confrontation and defeat, both electoral and socially.
Democrats like Newsom and Biden are up to the task and know what they’re up against.Report
Comrades, let’s not be too harsh on the OP. To be sure, he’d prefer an SOTU-delivering conservative to a letter-writing liberal. This doesn’t invalidate the criticism of the SOTU Theater, it just points out that institutional problems are easier to see when you don’t like the people currently vested with the power of the institution and that actual policies pursued by those powerful people are ultimately more important.
I hated the SOTU under Trump, and rather enjoyed it under Obama. I didn’t watch or listen at all last night. That is what I think we must do if Grandiose SOTU performances are to recede — politicians will stop doing That Thing if That Thing fails to draw eyeballs. Have game night with your family or go play darts with friends in the pub instead. Regardless of who’s delivering the vapid speech.Report
Voting for a Democrat is one of those things you say, like “I’ll eat my hat”. We can’t expect the author to actually do it. As for me, I stopped watching the SOTU, and nearly all other presidential speeches, some time during Bush 1.Report
Then perhaps this should have been better written:
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I think you should be angrier about it though.Report
The eat my hat part or the monarchical scourge part?Report
Well, you started angry at the article, so just go with that.Report
I’m not angry. I simply said – as others have observed – that the OP’s other writings lead me to conclude he wouldn’t vote for a democrat who is turning the SOTU back into a letter. I then asked him how he felt having seen the thing. Neither of those statements is made in anger.
What I was trying to get you to clarify was what you think I should be angrier at. Apparently you don’t care to, so I guess we move on.Report
You indicated lack of respect for the author, and Burt was concerned about harshness. I don’t think it’s a stretch to see some anger in your comments. More broadly, there’s a pattern of slamming the authors of any conservative piece on this site for being conservative, rather than for the content of their writing.Report
Naked and blatant bigotry ought to indicate someone you should cease to engage with. Said poster has often indicated he considered all conservatives to be “Inflammatory Label.”
I never learn either.Report
One thing that annoys me about the SOTU is the seeming obligatory “the state of our union is strong!” statement. Excluding addresses that weren’t technically SOTUs, I had to go back to 1995 to find one without some variant.
I get that Presidents are usually trying to strike an optimistic tone, but it just seems so ham-fisted and unnecessary.Report
“The state of the union is strong! We have elected two dead people to Congress, and nobody was upset!”Report