It's Tuesday, Feb. 7. Tonight, Joe Biden delivers his third State of the Union address. Although nitpickers will say that a president's first such speech (Biden's was on April 28, 2021) is technically called "an address to a joint session of Congress."
But let's not stand on ceremony: This is Biden's third such annual address. And barring something unforeseen, it will be as boring and predictable as the first two. Staying awake through the whole thing may require a caffeinated beverage.
I don't say that as a Republican -- for the simple reason that I'm not a Republican. I don't say that as a closet progressive who believes Democrats need a younger and dynamic party leader. (I'm not a Democrat, either). I say that as a journalist who has covered these speeches since the 1980s and have difficulty summoning a single eloquent line from any of them.
I do remember some of the atmospherics, but most of them are disagreeable: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tearing a copy of President Trump's speech in half disgustedly; a rude Republican House backbencher embarrassing himself by shouting "You lie!" to President Obama; Obama inappropriately using his speech to try to influence Supreme Court members about pending federal litigation; the endless standing ovations from members of Congress in the president's party for perfectly banal rhetoric. That sort of thing.
As bad as the speeches are, they are also too long -- a twist on the famous Woody Allen line about the Catskill vacationer complaining about a resort's food being terrible, but the portions too small. It was Bill Clinton who started the unfortunate modern precedent of giving Fidel Castro-length harangues in his SOTU addresses. Clinton's average length over two terms was nearly 1 hour and 15 minutes. To watch them all would take about 10 hours. Was this an example of clinical narcissism or just excess Washington wind-baggery? To civic-minded Americans trying to do their part by watching, it's a distinction without a difference. In the sage words of David Von Drehle, Clinton's speeches were the equivalent of "an annual national canal." It's no surprise, then, that Clinton's dubious record was broken by Donald Trump, a man whose love of the sound of his own voice is limitless.
Wouldn't a nice, tight speech tonight be just the ticket? Don't count on it. But the least Biden could do would be to curb the presidents' habit of salting the audience in the Capitol with hordes of "ordinary" American heroes. They stole this gimmick from Ronald Reagan, but expanded on it, whilst exploiting it for partisan political purposes, which is exactly the opposite of what the Gipper did, as I'll explain in a moment.
On Jan. 13, 1982, two weeks before Ronald Reagan's first official State of the Union address, the nation's capital was in the grip of a vicious snowstorm. Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, then known simply as "National Airport," was intermittently closed that day, but the runways were open at 3:59 p.m. when the pilots of Air Florida Flight 90 began taxiing for a return trip to Fort Lauderdale.
Instead, heavy ice on the wings caused the plane to flutter as it took off. It crashed into the Potomac River almost immediately, clipping the 14th Street Bridge between Washington and Arlington, Va., killing four motorists on the roadway.
Of the 79 passengers and crew aboard the plane, only five would come out of that river alive. One passenger who survived the crash itself, Arland D. Williams, drowned while trying to assist the few other survivors. As a crowd on the riverbank watched in horror, a passenger named Priscilla Tirado was flailing in the icy water trying vainly to grab a rope dropped from a responding helicopter.
As rescue personnel urged her to grab the line, a government employee named Martin Leonard Skutnik III tore off his coat and boots and jumped into the freezing river to save her. Lenny Skutnik, as everyone knew him, was a printer's assistant in the Congressional Budget Office. A nameless bureaucrat, you might say, in a government workforce that Ronald Reagan himself had implied on more than one occasion -- including in his 1981 Inaugural Address -- was part of the problem, not the solution.
On this day, Lenny Skutnik was the solution. Ms. Tirado was rescued and her hero made it safely out of the frigid Potomac himself. To his credit, Reagan and his advisers immediately grasped the symbolic power of Skutnik's act. They realized that it made an even better story, with a more nuanced lesson, that the young man wasn't a first responder or military man. He was an everyday hero, a "faceless" government bureaucrat in the lexicon of conservatives. No matter.
"Just two weeks ago, in the midst of a terrible tragedy on the Potomac, we saw again the spirit of American heroism at its finest, the heroism of dedicated rescue workers saving crash victims from icy waters," Reagan said in his 1982 State of the Union address.
"And we saw the heroism of one of our young government employees, Lenny Skutnik, who, when he saw a woman lose her grip on the helicopter line, dived into the water and dragged her to safety."
Oh, and President Reagan's 1982 speech clocked in at 30 minutes. It was plenty long enough.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
