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Last week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said "(The State of the Union address) is so unimportant in the lives of the American people. Especially those that are victims of the shutdown; hostages to the president's applause line and campaign speech."
Forget about the politics involved for the moment; it got me wondering. What DO Americans get out of that speech?
It is written in to the Constitution that the president should "from time to time give to Congress information of the state of the union."
It serves as a bit of an assessment, and a bit of a crystal ball for those who wonder what's going on in the Oval Office.
So I did a little reading on important previous addresses -- speeches it turned out were certainly not unimportant.
In 1790, George Washington used it to remind the nation of the importance of keeping a standing army, and ask Congress to make education a priority. "There is nothing which can better deserve your patronage than the promotion of science and literature," he said.
James Monroe used the speech to spell out what would become the Monroe Doctrine, drawing a line on the globe that would stand for a century and a half. James Polk was so worked up about the metals in California that he sparked the Gold Rush.
Of course Abraham Lincoln gave plenty of speeches that made history, but his 1862 State of the Union was used to cement the ideals of the Emancipation Proclamation. "In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free -- honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve," he said.
Lyndon Johnson's 1964 speech is known to most of us as the "War of Poverty" speech, and sparked a government-wide effort that … well, from my point of view, anyway, hasn't done much to win that war, but certainly has made the federal government part of the cycle.
A decade later, Richard Nixon suffered through a little slip of the tongue when he meant to say "we must replace the discredited welfare system," but instead said "we must replace the discredited PRESIDENT." Whoops. Wonder what he had on his mind.
A year later, then, Gerald Ford had to march out onto the floor of Congress and say bluntly "the state of the Union is not good."
Remarkable as it may seem now, Bill Clinton used the speech in 1996 to declare "The era of big government is over." Of course, he also used it to asked Congress to "never, ever shut the federal government down again …" That's gone well.
And, incredibly, it has been 17 years since George W. Bush said Iran, Iraq and North Korea were part of an "axis of evil" to which "the price of indifference could be catastrophic."
There are more, of course; though, on the other hand, I have no idea whether President Donald Trump has got anything on that level to say, this year.
It's the kind of speech that, as Pelosi suggested is often not all that important to Americans in the moment -- trying to scrabble through their daily lives perhaps despite the federal government -- but it contains nuggets that get picked apart by policy wonks and historians later. Plenty of ordinary Americans probably WERE far more concerned about how they were going to feed their kids last week after going another pay period without a check, or wondering how in the world we have in place officials like Commerce Secretary (COMMERCE, for goodness sake) Wilbur Ross, who "doesn't really quite understand why" furloughed federal workers weren't all rushing out to get loans to cover the gap in pay.
In any event the postponement of the speech was just a sign of how strange this whole situation has become; though it seems to be over, for now. Kind of makes you wonder what the speech-writer are working on, for the day on which this year's finally is given.
Christina Myer is executive editor of The Parkersburg News and Sentinel. She can be reached via e-mail at cmyer@newsandsentinel.com