By Josep Colomer.
In the Roman imperial city of Washington, full of temples and monuments to the Caesars of the glorious past, the Emperor-President, with all pomp and ceremony addresses the Senate (and the House). In a moment of patriotic union, the members of Congress unanimously applaud, bow and revere.
From The Washington Post:
“The pomp and scale that surrounds Washington is a skeleton of the past. That’s not meant to refer solely to the architecture, the fake-it-till-you-make-it pretensions of a young country written in marble. It refers to much of the pageantry that we still embrace, beyond modern utility or necessity. It refers, to be direct, to the State of the Union address.
“In 1789, it was perhaps useful to remind the president of the importance of keeping Congress (then numbering fewer than 100 people) up to speed on what was happening in the nation on the whole…. President Woodrow Wilson began the idea of giving those updates in a speech, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt made the State of the Union a spectacle. And once a spectacle is begun in Washington, it’s got inertia.
“We have the speech because it is Tradition, and that Tradition reflects the Importance of the Office. So Obama walks onto the House floor, passing through an effusive crowd of legislators as they imagine themselves making that same walk, and the Great Spectacle of Washington is upheld.”
(January 19, 2015, by Philip Bump)
Democrat President Obama, Democrat President of the Senate Biden, Republican Speaker of the House Boehner.
Republican President Bush, Republican President of the Senate Cheney, Democrat Speaker of the House Pelosi.
