Get ready for a night of political theater.
 | By John Guida Senior Staff Editor, Opinion |
When President Biden delivers his State of the Union address tonight, he will be speaking to a new Republican majority in the House, just ahead of his expected announcement of a 2024 re-election campaign. |
The tradition of speaking directly to members of Congress, Supreme Court justices and millions of Americans at home about the administration's accomplishments and goals is many things, but it is above all political theater. Is it meaningful political theater? And if it is, what does it mean? |
One way to figure that out is to ask people who think about politics and theater what the president should say, whom he should say it to and how he should say it. |
Several observers weighed in. The law professor Kate Shaw, in her first piece as a Times Opinion contributing writer, argues that Biden should take the opportunity "to begin a deliberate, sustained process of reminding both the public and the justices that the court is part of the nation's democratic fabric — and that neither the court's decisions nor its members are beyond criticism." |
In the face of a conservative court supermajority, she writes, the president should "emphasize that the relationship between" it and the American public "is dialectical, and at different moments the court and public opinion have acted upon one another in different ways." |
Michelle Cottle, a member of the editorial board, will be paying attention to the president's messaging. She writes, "With President Biden assumed to be gearing up for a re-election run, he will be test driving issues and messages with campaign potential." |
Cottle will also be keeping an eye out for any reaction in the room from the G.O.P. "How disrespectfully will members of the opposing party behave?" she asks. "Will the chaos monkeys be on their best behavior, or will the compulsion to act out prove overwhelming?" |
In the latest edition of The Conversation, Gail Collins and Bret Stephens swap thoughts about and expectations for the State of the Union — and concerns about public engagement with the event itself. Stephens says that he is "about as excited about it as I am for the Oscars," expressing not a little dread. |
Collins looks on the bright side: "A cheerful State of the Union would definitely be more interesting than the Oscars," she says, and points out that the president has "some things to celebrate with the economy going well." |
Perhaps the form needs updating. Josh Tyrangiel, an Emmy-winning TV producer, has some suggestions for a more media-savvy approach to the address. In a guest essay, he writes that it's "way past time to integrate other media." |
Citing the effective multimedia strategy of the Jan. 6 committee, he argues for "a meticulous storytelling machine." |
"Let's say Mr. Biden wants to boast about the $80 billion in the Inflation Reduction Act for revitalizing the I.R.S. Rather than serve up that lean jerky of acronyms and numbers, dim the lights on the joint session and take America to the movies. Transport viewers to the I.R.S. office in Austin, Texas, where as recently as last year, the cafeteria was a wall-to-wall maze of paper tax returns." He might "integrate a few short films into the standard presidential speech" to transform "a to-do list into a story about America, an actual state of the union." |
We never know how the State of the Union will land, if it will resonate or be forgotten by the morning. What we do know is that the Constitution doesn't mandate political theater but rather (in Article II, Section 3, Clause 1) that the president "shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient." |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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