Why are we still doing State of the Union addresses?

OPINION:

Like most of us, I watched the State of the Union (well, some of it) Tuesday night. Also, like most of us, I wondered how we got to this point. To borrow from Ernest Hemingway, the answer is gradually, then suddenly.

The only thing the Constitution requires is that the president “shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the State of the Union.” That’s it. No requirement with respect to tempo or thoroughness or anything, really.

For his first State of the Union address on Dec. 8, 1801, President Jefferson sent written copies to both houses of Congress to be read by clerks. Mr. Jefferson wisely wanted to get rid of what had become our imitation of the British monarch’s annual speech from the throne.

Unfortunately, over time, Americans’ obsessive and expansive talent for marketing turned a simple administrative process into hours of uncomfortable, loud and mostly pointless political posturing.

The healthy practice of sending written copies to Congress continued for more than a century until the most destructive president in our nation’s history, Woodrow Wilson, began the long erosion of the address by resuming the tradition of delivering it in person in April 1913. Wilson also transformed the address from a sober assessment of the federal government and the nation into a propaganda event designed to sell the president’s agenda.

In 1947, President Truman sharpened the propaganda value of the address by broadcasting the address on television. Dropping the atomic bombs may not have been a war crime, but televising speeches should be.

President Johnson made everything worse by moving the speech to prime time.

It is not accidental that the dumbing down of the address was running along a parallel and bipartisan track. The unfortunate tradition of the response to the address started in 1966, when Sen. Everett Dirksen and Rep. Gerald Ford offered the first response.

Blame President Reagan for being the first to use human props in the audience. In 1982, Reagan invited Lenny Skutnik to the speech so he could praise him for risking his life in an attempt to save passengers on a plane that had crashed into the Potomac River two weeks earlier.

What that has to do with the state of the union is anyone’s guess, but the terrible precedent has stuck, and we are now apparently condemned to having human props appear indefinitely. It has become so bad that members of Congress now send out press releases touting whom they have invited to the State of the Union. Not to be indelicate, but who cares?

As a consequence of becoming more politicized and therefore trivialized, the speech itself has become increasingly more dislocated from the actual reality of the state of our union. Under presidents of all stripes, it has become a contest of who can staple the most slogans together or who can propose the most federal programs, irrespective of whether any of them actually address any of the challenges faced by our union.

Tuesday’s speech did not address or even note most of the real problems our union faces. The president did address immigration, and for that he should be commended, but the list of unaddressed topics is long and includes the dissolution of the family and all the attendant pathologies, the deterioration of communal sensibilities, the erosion in our educational system, a federal government grown too large and too distant from those it rules, the inability of our military to win wars, and the concentration of the real privilege of growing up in two-parent households that value moral behavior and achievement.

The speech addressed none of these foundational problems of the union. Consequently, you can’t really blame the congressional Democrats, about half of whom (depending on whom you believe) figured playing hooky was a better use of their time and skipped out on the proceedings. No telling why the other half couldn’t figure out something more productive to do on a Tuesday night.

The good news is that the State of the Union keeps the media distracted for a couple of weeks. Mexico is melting down, we’re heading toward conflict with Iran, we killed a bunch more “drug traffickers” this week, and every day we add about $5 billion to the debt our children will carry. But hey, we saw the Olympic hockey team!

The other good news is that very, very few voters are swayed by speeches. Most are focused on the macaroni of their own lives: jobs and finances, schools for the children, health care, and worrying about whether we are going to go to war somewhere.

Anywhere from half to two-thirds of them think the nation is headed in the wrong direction. Each year, they listen to a speech that tells them everything is good. Then they head back to their lives.

• Michael McKenna is a contributing editor at The Washington Times.