Ronald Reagan introduced human props to the State of the Union in 1982 and though the practice began modestly with a single guest and with good intentions, it had, by the end of Reagan’s presidency, become perfunctory and clichéd. George H.W. Bush tempered the practice some, but Bill Clinton took it to new heights — or exploitative lows — and there it has remained.
President Barack Obama’s guest list for tonight’s State of the Union numbers 24, if I’ve counted correctly. Not every guest on the list will be singled out during tonight’s speech (the record for shout outs during a State of the Union address is seven, held by Clinton), but each guest’s presence puts a human face on the president’s legislative agenda.
Obama’s guest list can be divided into several major categories. Among them: gun violence, health care, immigration, changes within the military (gays in the military and women in combat), the importance of science and technology, and vocational education.
The guest list, as released late this morning by the White House, follows on the jump.
But first, this year marks the 100th anniversary of Woodrow Wilson’s trip to Capitol Hill to do something that hadn’t been done since John Adams last did it in 1800: Read a State of the Union address before a joint session of Congress.
Wilson’s 28-minute spoken message broke a tradition that Thomas Jefferson had begun in 1801 when he opted to fulfill his constitutional mandate by sending members of Congress a written State of the Union rather than delivering a speech. Wilson’s decision to give a State of the Union address, something only George Washington and Adams had done before him, began an evolutionary drift that, a century later, has saddled us with today’s “tiresome pageant,” as I called the State of the Union in a column published last year.
Obama’s State of the Union speeches have averaged 7,080 words and it’s taken him an average of 65 minutes to deliver them, according to the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Obama’s average puts him just behind Clinton (7,426 words, 75 minutes) on the list of long-winded presidents. Their spoken average, however, is far behind William Howard Taft’s 22,610-word written average. Taft, Wilson’s predecessor, was as bloated in words as he was in body.