The Proud, Bipartisan Tradition of Prewritten Responses to the State of the Union Address

One note to add to Kevin’s thorough denunciation of the tradition of the State of the Union Address: all of them are really predictable.

Just how predictable? If you read the print version of a newspaper on the Eastern time zone, and the newspaper’s coverage of the State of the Union in the following morning’s edition featured a quote from your senator or Congressman reacting to the speech, there is an excellent chance that the congressman issued the statement before the speech was delivered.

Television news media may love the State of the Union Address, but for daily newspapers it’s a pain. The speech isn’t given until 9 p.m. Eastern, and it doesn’t wrap up until 10 p.m., and sometimes much later, like if Bill Clinton is speaking. (In 1995, President Clinton spoke for one hour and twenty-four minutes.) The final deadlines for most newspapers on the East Coast are either right before then, right around then, or right after then.

The White House always releases some excerpts early, so the Washington correspondents can usually string together a basic, generic, bare-bones version of “the President declared that the state of the country is strong before assembled lawmakers in the U.S. Capitol Tuesday night.”

Back in my wire service days, one of my jobs on State of the Union day was to write the “Local Members of Congress Respond to the President’s Address” article, and the deadline for a piece like that was closer to 5 or 6 p.m. in the evening — hours before the speech was delivered. Most Congressional offices completely understood the deadlines and would either send over a pre-written statement or, in a couple cases, get the Congressman on the phone for a few minutes to give a “response” – using past tense – to a speech that hadn’t been delivered yet.

This was silly, but it wasn’t a scandal; waiting until after the speech was delivered would mean that the response from members of Congress would run in Thursday’s newspaper and by then readers didn’t care. The question “what did you think of the president’s speech?” was always just another way of asking, “what do you think of the president?” My wire service days were in George W. Bush’s first term, and so the Republicans I covered always liked the president’s remarks and the Democrats were always “concerned” or “disappointed.”

I never had a single lawmaker frantically call, wishing to take back or alter their pre-issued statements.