Mitch PerryIt wasn’t that long ago — 2010 perhaps? — when I still eagerly anticipated watching the State of the Union address from Washington.
But no mas.
In January of 2010, my first year writing for Creative Loafing, the editors thought it would be cool for me to “live-blog” the event. And it was sort of cool. That was the SOTU when President Obama casually dropped the news that he was going to provide the funding for a high-speed rail line between Tampa and Orlando. We all know what happened with that.
But sometime between then and now the SOTU completely jumped the shark, and tonight’s epic cable news extravaganza is bound to disappoint, though I’m sure some conservatives are fired up to watch the official response from Iowa’s U.S. Sen. Jodi Ernst, hopefully not in a hermetically sealed studio that automatically kills any energy in the room. (Think of Bobby Jindal’s notorious horrific response from a few years back.)
I think I lost a lot of respect for MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow a few years ago when she excitedly told her viewers that the SOTU was the “most exciting night of the year” for her. Really, Rachel?
Really?
The SOTU may still be fun for some folks to watch and tweet, which certainly made watching the 2012 presidential debates a different experience. And yes, some people like to watch to mock their national lawmakers, as they do making fun of the stars who attend the Academy Awards. In previous years TV comics like Dennis Miller and Jon Stewart have done live broadcasts while the speech was airing live, because people really cared about it.
But the dysfunction in Washington makes a kind of mockery of this annual ritual.
Most if not all of the things that President Obama will talk about tonight in terms of proposals aren’t going to be approved by the Republican-led Congress. Whose fault is that? Republicans complain that the president never engages with them (which is true), while the White House says the GOP is ready to automatically oppose anything he proposes (also true, and has been since Mitch McConnell declared that his number one job was to make Obama a one-term president). And hence the divide we have, only exacerbated by the Republicans taking over the Senate last fall.
So I’m over it. Yes, of course I’ll hate to watch it, but the whole ritual — The guy who announces with gusto, “The President of the United States!” to the president walking the line shaking hands and kissing folks, to handing off a copy of his speech to Joe Biden and John Boehner in a manilla folder. It’s such a tired show now.
And the public has been tuning out as well. In 1994, Bill Clinton’s speech was watched by 45.8 million people. Last year Obama was on 13 different networks and viewed by 33.3 million people.
And though there may be a few surprises, the president has already leaked several of the proposals — not to the press — but to the whole world, in speeches and social media.
But whatever I think of the SOTU, it ain’t going anywhere. Not yet anyway. Just don’t expect anything interesting to come out of it.
In other news,
Bill Nelson calls the Saudi Arabia government “two-faced’ when it comes to what they say to their own people, and what they’re actually doing behind closed doors when it involves terrorism.
The gutting of the Voting Rights Act and the push to get a constitutional ballot on the 2016 ballot in Florida to allow for ex-felons to get their voting and civil rights gained automatically were the big themes discussed at yesterday’s (marathon) Martin Luther King Jr. Breakfast in Tampa. Sirius/XM talk-show host Joe Madison gave the keynote speech.
And are we actually getting a little buzz in this year’s somnolent-to-date Tampa City Council elections? Jackie Toledo and Tommy Castellano dispute who’s the actual front-runner in their District 6 contest that goes before those voters on March 3.
