It's time to kill the State of the Union speech

RIP.

(Image created by Dall E)

On Tuesday, Joe Biden delivered his 2nd State of the Union speech to a joint session of Congress.

It should be his last.

That’s not a knock on Biden! I thought the speech he gave was among the best I have ever seen him give — he was energetic and effective throughout.

It is a direct shot, however, at the whole notion of a State of the Union address, which feels like a relic from another time that needs to be put out to pasture — and soon.

My experience with this year’s State of the Union was different than any one I have had before in my professional life. In the previous two decades, I have been working in newsrooms where SOTU was circled on the calendar for months — and was the subject of special sections and special coverage galore. It was a signpost date on the political calendar — no less so than a primary day or a debate night.

This year I am, well, not working in a newsroom. Which meant that I approached the SOTU speech with much less anticipation — and less of a sense that this was a BIG moment — than I have in a very long time.

In fact, I spent SOTU day in a sound-proof booth recording the audio version of my forthcoming book. (SHAMELESS PLUG: Preorder here!). I didn’t even think about the speech until, well, around 7 pm that night. (Related note: The speech starts after 9 pm on the East Coast. Too late!)

That said, I did watch. (Old habits die hard.) But, I was the exception rather than the rule on that front.

Meet the Press @MeetThePress

An estimated 27.3 million people watched President Biden’s State of the Union address on television — the second smallest audience for the annual event in at least 30 years. nbcnews.to/3HO3QqT

The second smallest audience in three decades!

Now, I am not suggesting here that ratings alone should determine how our political processes work. If that was the case, one of the “Real Housewives” would be president.

But, I do think it’s a telling indicator that the speech is outdated in our modern information economy. Consider that almost 67 million people watched Bill Clinton’s SOTU speech in 1993. That’s two and a half times the number who tuned in to watch Biden on Tuesday night.

Now, it’s OF COURSE true that there were far fewer viewing options on TV in 1993 than there are 30 years later. Streaming wasn’t even a thing then!

And so, it’s something of an apples and oranges comparison. At the same time, interest in politics hasn’t dissipated since 1993. If anything, it’s gone up. (More people tell pollsters they are closely monitoring politics/campaigns now than said the same three decades ago.)

What has changed is the how and where people are getting that information. News is now consumed in smaller chunks — broadcast via Twitter, Tik Tok, Instagram and Facebook. Viewership for cable news — up to and including on SOTU night — is down.

A speech that regularly runs more than an hour — especially when you factor in the performative applause that interrupts the president every few seconds/minutes — is just not something that makes sense in our current information climate.

And maybe none of that would matter if the actual speech was news-making or memorable in any meaningful way.

Quick, tell me the last SOTU address you actually remember? Off the top of my head, I could remember two: George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech in 2002 and Bill Clinton’s “the era of big government is over” speech in 1996.

That’s two in the last 27 years! And the last memorable SOTU speech was 21 years ago — and came after a terrorist attack on America!

Consider other SOTUs you might remember and you quickly come to realize they had nothing to do with the speech itself. There was Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” moment in 2009 and Marjorie Taylor Greene’s outbursts on Tuesday. (It’s not clear to me whether we will remember MTG’s yelling like we do the Wilson moment. I suspect not; we are inured to this sort of bad behavior now.)

The truth is that administrations — Democratic and Republican — no longer view the speech as a place to either a) makes news or b) make a statement. What the SOTU speech has devolved into over the last many years is one of two things:

1. A laundry list of policy proposals that the president wants to see Congress act on. The assumption, of course, is that 90%+ of these proposals will go nowhere — and everyone in the room knows it.

2. A rundown of what the administration has already accomplished — and how it’s having a beneficial impact on the country. This version of the speech usually comes in election years or close to them.

Biden’s speech on Tuesday was clearly of the second variety. He spent most of it touting his economic policies and their effects — and even debuted a 2024 campaign-worthy slogan “Let’s finish the job.”

Which is fine! Biden is the president! He should feel free to deliver a speech touting his accomplishments whenever he feels like it! My issue is with the glut of coverage of such a speech, which, honestly amounts to a relatively pedestrian recitation of the narrative the president wants to tell about the last year.

And, it’s not as though we are somehow required to do all of this. The relevant part of the Constitution says that the president “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.”

What that doesn’t say:

1. The speech has to be be delivered every year

2. The speech has to be a speech at all

In fact, for the entirety of the 19th century, presidents didn’t deliver a State of the Union speech at all. It was “both a lengthy administrative report on the various departments of the executive branch and a budget and economic message.” (Woodrow Wilson, in 1913, revived the idea of delivering SOTU as a speech.)

Politics tends to cling to outdated traditions long past their sell-by date. (I give you the Iowa caucuses!). The State of the Union speech is very much one of those antiques of a former age. It’s (past) time to end it.