At any rate, I caught up with the news this morning.
Ryan Lizza, writing about the speech in today's TNR Online, "Bush's Diminished Presidency," talked about the whole SOTU thing being a bit less than wonderous, for this president in particular, and speculated about doing away with it altogether (emph. added):
Finally, by a president's sixth State of the Union speech, everyone is a little tired of the whole spectacle, especially the press. In a president's first year in office, calls for banning the State of the Union aren't usually widespread. But by the sixth year, you can't read about the event without being reminded that the whole thing is a silly twentieth-century contrivance not even required by the Constitution.Sheesh. Now I really am sorry that I missed it.And as we saw last night, the president doesn't always have a whole lot to say by year six anyway. But there was one moment that spoke in favor of keeping the tradition alive. Bush's statement that "Congress did not act last year on my proposal to save Social Security" was met with raucous applause and cheers from Democrats. Bush seemed genuinely taken aback and embarrassed by the response. It punctured the pomposity of the event and was probably the closest our system ever gets to a Prime Minister's Questions-style drubbing of the president by the legislature. Let's hope there's more of it in the future. So two cheers for the State of the Union, the one opportunity each year for Congress to publicly humiliate the president.
2 comments:
I remember watching one of Nixon's SOTU addresses in which he said, "Let's get America energy independent by 1980."
I'm just a little cynical about the whole deal.
Cynical about energy independence? For shame. Don't forget that during the Carter administration he was promoting solar energy and the feds paid people to install solar panels on their houses. The electric company installed an array of solar panels near here that was about a mile wide and two miles long with a federal subsidy. When George the First came to power he discontinued the subsidy for solar energy and the company disassembled the field and sold the panels off as scrap. I have two of them on my boat that I bought as scrap from PG & E for twenty bucks. Cost to install them was about $400 each for the panels. So we got them at 5% of cost, but at least they unplugged the panels from the electrical grid and went back to imported oil for energy. But it sounds good in speeches because everybody is for it, like universal health care, and better schools.
Post a Comment