NO wonder the ratings are law; Thomas Jefferson refused to give a State of the Union Address; maybe that wasn't such a bad idea.

• Author: Frankel, Jonathan
• Position: Includes related article on the cabinet shuffle

No Wonder the Ratings Are Low

In November 1978, five of President Carter's speechwriters gathered in chief speechwriter James Fallows's White House office to begin a preliminary draft of the State of the Union Address. Fallows and Paul Jensen, fresh from the tennis court and still sporting their whites, were joined by Hendrik Hertzberg, Walter Shapiro, and Robert Rackliff. The night before, the president had embarrassed himself in a television interview with Bill Moyers by being unable to cite a coherent theme to his presidency. So the five writers wanted an overarching slogan for the address. Early on they decided that it should be two words and that the first should be "new," harking back to the political slogans of yesteryear. They tried some combinations with "groundwork" and "building blocks" and even considered scrapping "new" for "improved." After about an hour of brainstorming, Hertzberg came up with the "New Foundation." The test-tube slogan was filed away for two months until a week before the speech, when it was plucked from a file cabinet and became the centerpiece of the address. "In the back of my mind," Shapiro says, "I was thinking, 'I just know FDR didn't do it like this.'"

Maybe FDR didn't, but lots of other presidents did. The State of the Union Address has become a collection of jerry-rigged slogans, mix-and-match metaphors, and pet ideas. Sure, it has all the trappings of a national drama--Supreme Court justices make a rare public appearance, the doorkeeper of the House announces the president's arrival, cameras pan a crowded and attentive chamber--but the truth is the State of the Union relates less and less to the state of the union each year.

The metaphor war

We owe the idea to the British, who traditionally have the monarch address the opening of Parliament. The framers at our Constitutional Convention founded the President's Annual Message, as it used to be called, with little doubt about its usefulness, writing it into Article II, Section 3 with no recorded debate. But despite the clear original intent, there has been controversy. The speech's royal lineage so vexed the farmer-republican Thomas Jefferson that in 1801 he broke with Washington's precedent and refused to deliver the Annual Message in person. Instead, he sent a written statement to Capitol Hill. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Annual Message was little more than a memo.

Then came Woodrow Wilson. Ignoring congressional outrage, he announced he...