Ask any speechwriter who has ever spent hundreds of hours crafting a State of the Union address, and they will tell you it is one of the worst speeches a president gives during the year.
White House speechwriters have been known to hide out in their offices with fellow aides guarding the door.
The pressure to include a laundry list of accomplishments and policy proposals while clearly (but subtly) contrasting the president’s agenda with the agenda of the opposing political party can be a true wordsmithing challenge.
White House speechwriters have been known to hide out in their offices with fellow aides guarding the door to prevent more pitches from Cabinet members, elected officials and every person in Washington who wants to hear their priority issues name-checked. Even so, the final speech can easily fall into the trap of sounding like a hodgepodge of unrelated topics connected only by awkward transitional sentences.
And then there is the explosion of information sources in this country. Most Americans are no longer crowding around their sets at 9 p.m. waiting eagerly to watch a speech from start to finish.
So is there even a point to this tradition?
Yes.
Because despite the State of the Union’s flaws, it remains the best chance any president has to tell the American people en masse what he has been working on and what he wants to do moving forward.
It is also an opportunity to reset the conversation, the narrative and the focus of the public.
Back in the winter of 1999, President Bill Clinton was in the middle of an impeachment inquiry. Republicans felt he should not deliver a State of the Union address — and they were not alone. Even some Democrats were calling on him to delay the speech. But he did it anyway. Clinton did not talk about the scandal hanging over his head. Instead, he delivered a soaring (and lengthy) speech about the economy. And he managed to get a version of the reset he so desperately needed.
President Barack Obama was not mired in…
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