Eliminate the “State of the Union” Address? What’s Left Then?
Lewis Gould argues in a Washington Post op-ed that we ought to “end the bombast’ of the annual presidential State of the Union address to Congress.
What, get rid of that ritual of somber attention to our leader? C’mon, Lew, there’s little enough left of tradition now that men no longer wear hats.
Professor of history emeritus (which means he’s retired from active duty) at the University of Texas, Gould wrote a history of the modern United States Senate, plus a bunch of other quite well received books on the presidency and Congress. Which I guess gives him stature, but maybe too little sense of what we who are not historians need of our presidents.
We’re in a time (and have been for some years) when we don’t really think of ourselves as ‘having a president.’ In place of that, we have presidents in transition, who’ve either just been elected or will soon have to run for re-election, kind of one foot on banana-peel presidencies. FDR was certainly president, the only one I’d ever heard of un…