Can one tell the difference between
campaign speeches and political fund raisers with any State of the
Union address?
Todd S. Purdom wrote at
Politico:
Blame Woodrow Wilson, who broke a century-old presidential tradition of delivering the State of the Union message only in writing. Blame Harry S. Truman, the first chief executive to make the address on television, or Lyndon B. Johnson, the first to do so in prime time. ...“The Constitution’s mild requirement has become a tiresome exercise in political exhibitionism,” the columnist George Will wrote this week, calling the speech “the most execrable ceremony in the nation’s civic liturgy, regardless of which party’s president is abusing it” as a “made-for-television political pep rally.”
It
was Ronald
Reagan who
invited
the first citizen hero to be saluted in the House gallery by a
president during a State of the Union speech as an “honored guest”.
It
is time for presidents to take the cue of Thomas
Jefferson
and submit in writing to Congress the State of the Union because it
has become nothing but a dog-and-pony show and “partisan
spectacle”. Our nation did fine without the spectacle for 112
years. The longest State of the Union addresses delivered in 1995 and
2000 goes to William
Clinton,
lasting almost an hour and a half.
Most speeches last a little more than thirty minutes.
The
blog, Ghosts
of Judd Hall
had it right in 2013:
Please Mr. President Submit It in Writing. Thomas Jefferson was onto something. Email the written address to every Congressional member, make it a downloadable PDF file at www.whitehouse.gov, publish it in every newspaper that spans Our Nation and hand out copies to anyone that wants to read it. Publish the visiting team's written response too. Save us from another night of feigned bipartisanship, political bickering and inaction. Spare us from the television coverage. Maybe The President and the Congressional leaders could spend that Monday night doing something constructive instead of talking.
Hypocrisy
was prevalent when Obama received a standing ovation when he entered
to make his political speech. Congress should have remained ominously
silent after the past several weeks of Obama's deliberate
flouting of Congress's authority.
As
usual, Obama's foreign policy claims were mythical.
Overall it was fantastic
tale. To Obama, the greatest
threat is climate
change. The League
of Junk Scientists and Alarmist Politicians marches on.
Obama's
tax plan is incredible, making the death
tax even more
cruel and raising taxes instead of budgeting – a problem on
both sides of the political aisle. In reality, the Obama death tax
proposal is a creation of a “second
death tax”.
Let's cut out the PR tactics and start a true reformation back to the Founder's constitional republic.
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