More things change, more they remain the same. From a year ago—
The State of the Union Is Unrecognizable
A long, surprisingly standard speech ignored the tumultuous lived reality of American politics over the past year—and the likely reality in the year to come.
The reality is somewhat less rosy: By a wide margin, Americans believe that the nation is on the wrong track, and the president’s approval rating is historically low. Trump has struggled to push his agenda through Congress, just squeaking a big tax cut in at the end of last year. That presents three challenges for the president, and his speechwriters: How do you boast about victories you haven’t had? How do you present new proposals when many of the old ones are still on the table? And how do you handle the Russia story that seems to consume most of politics each week? www.theatlantic.com/...
Anyone miss Gerald Ford? Anyone?
Only One President Had The Guts To Say The State Of The Union Is ‘Not Good’
Not good was an understatement. The nation was in the middle of a long recession, inflation ran wild, factories closed, crime rates soared and energy shocks and long gas lines were a recent memory. The continued debate over Nixon’s extreme corruption, which Ford had labeled “our long national nightmare,” still raged. And this is not to mention the continued revelations by congressional investigators about how the nation’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies routinely broke the law to undermine the civil and political rights of Americans….
The American people will have to wait 500 (fictional) years for another dose of negativity in the form of President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho telling them he knows “shit is bad right now with all that starving bullshit.”
But until then, we’ll always have Gerald Ford. www.huffingtonpost.com/...
Abbreviated History lesson
The State of the Union address's history, explained
The State of the Union address feels like a very old American
ritual, and it is. Yet many of its features that we take for granted today were in fact added by innovative presidents who decided to shake things up — sometimes for very idiosyncratic reasons.
There was Thomas Jefferson, who delivered the speech only in writing— perhaps because he was a terrible public speaker. There was Woodrow Wilson, who put his political science theories on presidential rhetoric into practice by reviving the in-person speech. And there was Ronald Reagan, who took advantage of television to show off special guests sitting in the crowd.
The Good, the Bad, the Weird—
(Which is a really interesting movie- 2 thumbs up)
Opinion: When the State of the Union gets weird
The State of the Union has always been more about theater than substance. By the next day, almost no one can remember what was said. The speech is too long, the applause insincere, the cutaways overly staged. Huge moonshots are announced, only to fall back to Earth, unremembered. Yet every now and then, the state of the union becomes so alarming that the State of the Union acquires a new fascination, as a different kind of theater. Sometimes, it is a theater of the absurd…
Last year's State of the Union address was mediocre, and sometimes strange, as when he took almost a minute to talk about a North Korean man whose legs were run over by a train. In September, when he spoke to the United Nations, he experienced something that no president ever has — the world's delegates laughed at him. In fact, they specifically broke into laughter when he began to brag about his accomplishments, a form of speaking very similar to a State of the Union address...
If a deeper Donald Trump exists, this would be a good time to find him. That would be a president who cares deeply about his entire people and can persuade a hostile Congress that he is willing to do the kind of horse-trading that makes Washington work, when it does. A president who would summon the ghosts of history in subtle ways, and talk about earlier challenges that Americans worked out, together. Who would invoke humor and self-deprecation. Who would be honest.
All of that would add up to a moonshot of promise. Instead, we are likely to hear the sound of an engine sputtering loudly on the launchpad, going nowhere. There will be uncompromising demands that he be given the funds for his wall. He will tee up the "emergency" that he needs to build it himself. He will find other distractions — perhaps a screed against Iran. Maybe even the weather? The polar vortex may allow him to joke, unscientifically, about climate change. In short, he will double down. That worked for a long time, but it just feels so 2016. www.mcall.com/...
Pulse of today’s voters—
Voters before State of the Union say U.S. is ‘bad,’ a ‘mess’ and ‘divided’
Registered voters asked to describe the State of the Union in the days before President Trump's Tuesday night address to the nation used words like "bad," a "mess" and "divided," underlining the pessimism even among Republicans about the country.
The majority of respondents in a new Hill-HarrisX poll used combative or negative words when asked to complete the sentence: “In your mind, the State of the Union is.” An analysis of the responses found that Democrats skewed more negative than independents and Republicans in their word choice. thehill.com/...
How Mary Ann Marsh got this printed on FOX Nation, I’ll never know.
Trump and the State of the Union: America is angry and divided. Our president needs to bring us together
Unfortunately, today the state of our union is divided. As President Trump prepares to deliver his second State of the Union address Tuesday night, we are a nation divided by race, religion, gender, income, party, and … President Trump.
From the day he rode down the escalator in Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for president, Donald Trump has used words to divide the country and claim that our best days were behind us.
Trump’s words of anger and condemnation have continued unabated almost every day since, and he has left our country angry and divided. www.foxnews.com/... (Mary Anne Marsh: a Democratic political analyst and a principal at Dewey Square Group in Boston where she provides strategic counsel for Fortune 100 companies, non-profits & political campaigns.)