The (Annotated) State of the Union

The Pre-game

Before most State of the Union addresses, including those of the past decade-plus I’ve written about here, there’s a standard suite of pre-game questions. The two  usual biggest ones are:

Where will the speech stand, on the laundry-list scale? That is, will it be a speech at all, or essentially a big wish-list catalog?

For budget purposes and later maneuvering over policy and prominence, the entire rest of the government is continually scheming to get a sentence or even a clause in a State of the Union address, which it can quote the rest of the year. (“As the president himself put it …”) The classic illustration of this tendency is the “switchgrass” reference from George W. Bush’s speech in 2006: “We’ll also fund additional research in cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol, not just from corn but from wood chips and stalks or switchgrass.” Switchgrass?  You can bet that companies and government agencies in the plains states-biofuel business were citing that line through the rest of Bush’s term. (When I was working on one of these speeches for Jimmy Carter a full 40 years ago, I received piles of memos and three in-person visits from officials, all toward a one-sentence mention of a dam-building project in a poor country in Asia—which would have been that speech’s switchgrass moment, except that the sentence was cut in the final spasms of speech-shortening desperation.)

With the entirety of the policy establishment pushing in this direction, the natural tendency of speeches is to become long and checklist-like. The threshold question about each year’s speech, by any president, is how hard he and the writers will push back, toward the ever illusory less-is-more approach.

What tone will the speech strike—about the country, and the president?

By definition, modern televised State of the Union addresses have become quasi-imperial celebrations of presidential grandeur. The man himself is introduced to rousing cheers. He walks down the aisles of the House chamber receiving adoring touches from representatives and senators, some of whom have arrived hours early to be sure of a place within arm’s length of his procession path. He’s introduced once again as he stands before the crowd and gets another round of sustained cheers. By the time he steps away an hour or so later, he’s likely to have received a dozen or more standing ovations—and even if those are confined to members of his own party, it’s a much more celebratory experience than presidents get for a regular speech.

So while it’s certain that the president himself will be celebrated, he makes a choice about how to talk about the country and its mood. The crucial tone-signal in the speech usually arrives in the final words of a sentence whose initial words are, “And so I report to you tonight that the state of our union is …” What words come after that? Is the state of the union merely “good” or “strong,” the expected baseline terms? Is it more modestly “sound,” as Carter put it in his first address? Daringly, “not good,” as Gerald Ford claimed in an address during a recession and after the resignation of his predecessor, Richard Nixon? “Never been stronger” (George W. Bush, after the 9/11 attacks)? “Strong” (Barack Obama, whistling past the graveyard in the depths of the post-financial crash recession)? “Strong, prosperous, at peace, and we are free” (Reagan in his final address)? In ice-skating terms, this sentence is one of the compulsory figures, and while virtually no one in the public cares or can remember what words a president chooses, they’re important guides to the larger themes of the speech itself and the administration’s intended approach for the coming year.

There’s a bonus big question that viewers have in mind even if they haven’t formulated it consciously:

How does a president sound, look, and seem, in intangible pep-and-confidence terms?

Over the course of a year, this is a president’s best chance to command a large, sustained audience on his own terms—not during a press conference, with its bothersome reporters, nor during an Oval Office address, which usually happens when something has gone badly wrong. Audience sizes for State of the Union addresses go up and down over the years, depending on real-world circumstances and the level of suspense about what a president might say. But the audience remains quite large (if usually skewed in favor of a president’s supporters), and it’s drawn in part by the same factor that attracts large audiences for presidential debates: the chance to judge the person through the intimacy of TV and conclude, “He sounds good” or “he looks tired” or “he is nervous” or “he seems old.”

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Those are the general-public questions about State of the Union addresses, whether people realize they’re asking them or not. At the