“Rumors of my death have been highly exaggerated,” Mark Twain is supposed to have said after one news story reporting it.
Actually, he didn’t. He wrote a brief, dull note telling someone they had confused him with a cousin. Someone else made it better.
Now we have another exaggeration — at least. Before this year’s State of the Union report, Politico reporter Edward-Isaac Dovere asked, “Is Barack Obama killing the State of the Union?”
{mosads}If he is, Obama hasn’t done a good job.
Even Dovere seems to know that. After summarizing the “logic that led the White House to kill the State of the Union,” he adds, “Not completely, of course.”
To quote Billy Crystal, the State of the Union isn’t even “mostly dead.” Dovere makes his point by assembling in one piece many of the inaccuracies, half-truths and apples-and-oranges comparisons that surround this maddeningly imperfect but useful 225-year tradition.
Here are a few.
Apples and oranges: To measure decline in viewers, Dovere says, “the 30 million-or-so people who tune in” are “nowhere near the 67 million Bill Clinton drew in 1993 or the 52 million Obama got for his first one in 2009.”
Why is that wrong? Modern presidents traditionally do well in their first year and less well afterwards. Take Clinton. After that 67 million, he drew 45 million the next year. By 2000? Thirty-one million.
Second, presidents do worse when Congress is against them. Viewers, not irrationally, say, “Why watch? He won’t pass that stuff.” Political scientists often point to the increased indifference when different parties control Congress and the White House, with good reason. Most presidents get about 40 percent of their legislative requests through Congress. In 2013? Obama got 5 percent.
Inaccuracies: Obama, Dovere says, is “done with” the “State of the Union tradition of unveiling big announcements.” He points out that most of what’s in the speech — like free community college tuition, “they’ll have already announced.”
What’s wrong with that? Actually, the tradition is letting people know in advance. Again, look at Clinton in 1999 -— a good comparison because it was his next-to-last. His signature ideas for that year: “Save Social Security now,” and a few others.
Here’s E.J. Dionne that year, previewing the speech. “White House officials predict that any Social Security reform the [p]resident gets behind will be designed to save the system as it is.” He goes on, accurately, to list most of the major ideas in the speech.
When I was in the White House, leaking was the tradition. It still is.
Half-truths: Dovere’s piece points to the relatively late start Obama supposedly got on the speech. “It wasn’t until the flight out to Honolulu that Obama met with his chief speechwriter, Cody Keenan, to start sounding out the speech.”
That seems later than what’s happened other years. But first, it’s not as if nobody was doing any work. They were, as he acknowledges. Second, the White House has been doing this for six years! They don’t need all that time — especially not with a staff that can turn out a speech like last year’s. Once, I actually had the miserable experience of reading, or skimming, them all. The 2014 speech was the best written one I’ve ever read.
There is a White House tradition Dovere has observed: falling for administration officials claiming credit for clever things. He quotes White House Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri as arguing that in 2015 they don’t need to build “everything into one speech, in one hour.”
Everything, no. Not even almost everything. She’s right. But this is not a new insight. Even President Nixon in 1972 told his speechwriters, “don’t give me the laundry list.”
Nixon wound up with one, though. And I will apologize if the actual speech tonight doesn’t bop from one issue to the next — climate change, education, equality, healthcare and others. Why? As former Clinton Chief Speechwriter David Kusnet once put it, “People like laundry lists.”
About a quarter of the population actually pays attention. Researchers say that every issue a president mentions makes another 2 percent of Americans list them as a “key” issue. It is part of how presidents can change public opinion.
Which, incidentally, is hard to do. It’s common belief that presidents get a bump in the polls after a State of the Union. That seems reasonable. How could it be anything else after this speech, filled with glitz and pomp and ritual applause — and except for the usually muted minority response, no dissent?
But how long does that last? Pollster Mark Mellman pointed out a few years back that actually, approval ratings are as likely to go down after the magic night, as up.
That doesn’t mean Obama should kill the speech. It offers a guide to what the president wants, whether he gets legislation passed or not. Sometimes, like the Monroe Doctrine, or Franklin Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms,” it contains something historic.
But while the changes Dovere mentions are trivial, there is one terrible thing that Obama’s speech today will point out: the complete absence of any chance Americans have to see the two parties clash, head-to-head. In 1989 I wrote then-Sen. Lloyd Bentsen’s (D-Texas) Democratic response to President George W. Bush’s address. How, we asked, can one person alone in a room compete with what listeners have just seen?
The answer? They cannot, unless a speaker pulls a Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) — reaching for a glass of water that’s too far away.
It doesn’t have to be that way. And if readers want to see the alternative, they should watch what British Prime Minister David Cameron did this week — and every week. It’s a 133-year old British tradition called the Prime Minister’s Questions.
Like Obama, the prime minister walks into a packed House — of Commons. Then, he fields hostile, sarcastic, but substantive questions from the opposition — and, while Members of Parliament moan or cheer, fires right back. Also substantively. Yes, he has notes. But he’s not reading them. He knows his stuff.
It’s great theater. It’s really educational. Why can’t we have that?
Actually, we could. If Obama wants to do something great in 2015, he should start the President’s Questions. He knows his stuff.
And if he did, what president would have the nerve to cancel it? Picture the press conference where reporters ask why. (“Can’t you handle it, Mr. President?”).
The President’s Questions.
Do it, Mr. President! Instead of “killing” the modestly useful tradition we’ll continue Tuesday night — you will have given birth to a better one.
Lehrman is the former White House chief speechwriter to Vice President Gore and has published four novels and the widely used Political Speechwriter’s Companion. He teaches public speaking and political speechwriting at American University and writes often about politics.