Enough has already been said in judgment of the president’s State of the Union address last week. Media minds were already made up once they skimmed their advance copies. Political partisans didn’t have to wait that long. Much of the public, already predisposed to outsourcing its ideology, merely awaited their preferred spinmeisters – from the fawning to the furious.
For what it’s worth, I thought Republican Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina nailed it. “He sort of took us to the principal’s office, didn’t he,” rhetorically asked Burr. Indeed, the president inveighed against obstructionism and all those who put party and pollsters before country.
The SOTU speech has long been Exhibit A for awkward political theater. It’s just worse now, because civil discourse is increasingly passé. While the president is talking national security, health-care reform or jobs stimulus, viewers are privy to an agitprop live audience – from quirky and sometimes rude body language to the rise and fallout from applause lines.
Saturday Night Live did a satire three days later, and it wasn’t effective. How do you satirize a parody? The president should be reporting to Congress, not lecturing it. That’s lamentable, not funny.
But while the dynamics of a SOTU address aren’t likely to change, there is something that can be altered. How about re-arranging some of the furniture?
How about re-locating the vice president and the speaker of the house so that they don’t constitute an up-close-and-distracting backdrop to the president during his speech? And it’s not just the nodding, Cheshire cat-grinning Joe Biden and the human blink-a-thon, Nancy Pelosi. Same would have gone for the jumping-jack routines of Dick Cheney and Denny Hastert, Al Gore and Newt Gingrich or even Gerald Ford and Carl Albert.
We’ve been in this medium-is-the-message era for a while now. We know what works. It’s not fair to frame the speaker — let alone the president of the United States addressing all Americans — in such a fashion.
The cut-away shots to posturing pols — or even a naysaying Supreme Court justice — are TV staples. That’s a given for everybody but C-Span. Even though our politics are regrettably divisive, let’s at least give the president our undivided attention.