Noonan: The Sleepiness
of a Hollow Legend
The State of the Union is a grand
tradition—but only if people are listening.
By Peggy Noonan in the
Wall Street Journal
So the president's
State of the Union address is Tuesday night, and it's always such a promising
moment, a chance to wake everyone up and say "This I believe" and
"Here we stand." The networks are focused and alert, waiting to be
filled with a president's excellence and depth. It's a chance for the American
president to say whatever the storm, however high the seas, the union stands
"rock-bottomed and copper-sheathed, one and indivisible." That's how
Stephen Vincent Benet had Daniel Webster put it, in a play.
In a State of the
Union a president tries to put his stamp on things. Here we are, here's where
we're going, all roads lead forward. We can face whatever test, meet whatever
challenge, united in the desire that we be the greatest nation in the history
of man . . .
What great moments
this tradition has given us. JFK's father thought his son's first State of the
Union was better than his Inaugural Address. It had a warmth. "Mr. Speaker
. . . it is a pleasure to return from whence I came. You are among my
oldest friends in Washington—and this House is my oldest home." Friends,
home—another era. LBJ taking the reins in 1964: "Let this session of
Congress be known as the session which did more for civil rights than the last
hundred sessions combined." And you know, that's what it became. Nixon
enjoyed dilating on history, and was interesting when he did.
Reagan dazzled, though
he told his diary he never got used to it: "I've made a mil. speeches in
every kind of place to every kind of audience. Somehow there's a thing about
entering that chamber—goose bumps & a quiver." There was his speech
after he'd recovered from being shot—brio and gallantry. And of course Lenny
Skutnik. Just before Reagan's 1982 speech Mr. Skutnik, a government worker, saw
Air Florida Flight 90 go into the Potomac. As others watched from the banks of
the frozen river, Mr. Skutnik threw off his coat, dived in and swam like a
golden retriever to save passengers. The night of the speech he was up there in
the gallery next to the first lady, and when Reagan pointed him out the chamber
exploded. This nice, quiet man who'd gone uncelebrated all his professional
life, and then one day circumstances came together and he showed that beneath
the bureaucrat's clothing was the beating heart of a hero.
***
Well. History still
beckons, waiting to be made. The great unstated question of today: Can America
come back, reclaim her old spirit, confidence and joy, can we make things
again, build them, grow, create, push out into the new?
And here I think: Oh
dear.
Because when I imagine
Barack Obama's State of the Union, I see a handsome, dignified man standing at
the podium and behind him Joe Biden, sleeping. And next to him John
Boehner, snoring. And arrayed
before the president the members, napping.
No one's really
listening to the president now. He has been for five years a nonstop wind-up
talk machine. Most of it has been facile, bland, the same rounded words and
rounded sentiments, the same soft accusations and excuses. I see him enjoying
the sound of his voice as the network newsman leans forward eagerly, intently,
nodding at the pearls, enacting interest, for this is the president and he is
the anchorman and surely something important is being said with two such
important men engaged.
But nothing
interesting was being said! Looking back on this presidency, it has from the
beginning been a 17,000 word New Yorker piece in which, calmly, sonorously,
with his lovely intelligent voice, the president says nothing, or little that
is helpful, insightful or believable. "I'm not a particularly ideological
person." "It's hard to anticipate events over the next three
years." "I don't really even need George Kennan right now."
"I am comfortable with complexity." "Our capacity to do some
good . . . is unsurpassed, even if nobody is paying attention."
Nobody is!
He gave a speech on
the National
Security Agency, that bitterly
contested issue, the other day. Pew Research found half of those polled didn't
notice. National Journal's Dustin Volz wrote that Americans greeted the speech
with "collective indifference and broad skepticism." Of the 1 in 10
who'd followed it, more than 70% doubted his proposals would help protect
privacy.
The bigger problem is
that the president stands up there Tuesday night with ObamaCare not a hazy promise but a fact. People now
know it was badly thought, badly written and disastrously executed. It was
supposed to make life better by expanding coverage. It has made it worse, by
throwing people off coverage. And—as we all know now but did not last year—the
program was passed only with the aid of a giant lie. Now everyone knows if you
liked your plan, your doctor, your deductible, you can't keep them.
When the central
domestic fact of your presidency was a fraud, people won't listen to you
anymore.
The poor
speechwriters. They are always just a little more in touch with public
sentiment than a president can be—they get to move around in the world, they
know what people are saying. They have to imitate the optimism of the speeches
of yore, they have to rouse. They are the ones who know what a heavy freaking
lift it is, what an impossible chore. And they have to do it with idiots in the
staffing process scrawling on the margins of the draft: "More applause
lines!" The speechwriters know the answer is fewer applause lines, more
thought, more humility and candor. Americans aren't impressed anymore by
congressmen taking to their feet and cheering. They look as if they have
electric buzzers on their butts that shoot them into the air when the applause
line comes. "Now I have to get up and enact enthusiasm" is what they
look like they're thinking. While the other party thinks "Now we have to
get up too, because what he said was anodyne and patriotic and we can't not
stand up for that." And they applaud, diffidently, because they don't want
the folks back home—the few who are watching—to say they looked a little too
enthusiastic about the guy who just cost them their insurance.
They are all enacting.
They are all replicating. They're all imitating the past.
You know when we will
know America is starting to come back? When some day the sergeant at arms
bellows: "Mr. Speaker, the president of the United States" and the
camera shows a bubble of suits and one person emerges from the pack and walks
into the chamber and you're watching at home and you find yourself—against
everything you know, against all the accumulated knowledge of the
past—interested. It'll take you aback when you realize you're interested in
what he'll say! And the members won't just be enacting, they'll be leaning
forward to hear.
And the president will
speak, and what he says will be pertinent to the problems of the United
States of America. And thoughtful. And he'll offer ideas, and you'll think:
"Hey, that sounds right."
That is when you'll
know America just might come back.
Zzzzzzz.
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