The SOTU tonight

Washington journalists are among the few dead-enders eager to ascribe meaning to a night that faded long ago into meaningless ritual. White House aides have promised reporters, on the condition of anonymity of course, that the president will deliver a “unifying” speech on Tuesday.

The president supposedly did the same thing last year during his first speech to Congress, when he honored the tearful widow of fallen Navy SEAL Chief William Ryan Owens. It was a moment that stroked the erogenous zones of rinse-and-repeat pundits who can’t resist the idea that presidents should “grow” into their office, even if that president is a 71-year-old man who’s displayed remarkably consistent behavioral patterns over his four decades in American public life. But never mind that. Nothing washes away the sins of bad politics like good “optics.”

The State of the Union—with its applause lines and cutaway shots and carefully selected special guests—stopped being about the speech a long time ago. Political stagecraft is about “moments”—moments you’ll probably forget about in a couple days, anyway. A handful of smart people fell prey to this plainly avoidable sand trap last year, but none more so than Van Jones, a usually sharp-eyed contrarian who declared on CNN after the speech that Trump “became president of the United States in that moment, period.” Jones claimed it was “one of the most extraordinary moments you have ever seen in American politics,” which besides being flatly untrue—honoring our military heroes is among the most shopworn staples of political theater—sets an awfully low bar for the word “extraordinary.”

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Ratings for this year’s speech will undoubtedly be lower than last year’s. And it will have no impact on public opinion whatsoever.

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State of the Union ratings have been in steady decline for over a decade.

  Vanity Fair

So they pull a vanity-appealing stunt to get viewers.

The networks will [still, however,] put their biggest names on beautiful sets overlooking panoramas of Washington, executives will dash into town from New York on the Delta Shuttle to lord over their D.C. bureau control rooms, and producers will commission snap polls and maybe even a Frank Luntz focus group.

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And while roughly 800,000 Dreamers are waiting for a sign that the White House will protect them from deportation, whatever the president says about DACA won’t matter much, either. Congressional leaders in both parties will go back to hammering out a possible immigration deal on their own the next day, while Trump puts on a hat and pretends to make phone calls from an empty Oval Office desk.

Except after the ridiculing about that a week or so ago, they'll probably add some paperwork and open folders on the desk.

This year’s “official” Democratic response will be delivered by Rep. Joe Kennedy III, Robert F. Kennedy’s grandson and a 37-year old congressman from Massachusetts. Kennedy, once hailed by Joe Biden as a future president, is supposed to represent the next generation of party leaders, even though Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill is controlled by a group of 65-and-older politicians who would rather guzzle sewer water than turn their power over to the next generation.

And, until they're gone, nothing will improve. But by the time they're gone, the next generation of Congress critters will be steeped in the same power politics.

There’s also a response speech from Bernie Sanders that will be live-streamed. California Rep. Maxine Waters will do one for BET. Elizabeth Guzman, a newly elected Hispanic member of the Virginia House of Delegates, will deliver the Spanish-language response.

Any one of which will be better than Kennedy's. A celebrity state of the union address was held last night in New York. They should have held it at the same time as Trump's. And had they advertised it more, they would have reduced his viewer numbers by 80%.

Imagine if all the TV resources and all the talent dumped into a fleeting day of State of the Union coverage were spent on an an entire day—Any day! Pick a day!—of programming from McAllen, Texas, about the state of immigration under Trump. Imagine a day of stories about the divergent communities of central Ohio, where the vibrant information economy of the suburbs is at striking odds with the small town rot just 50 miles away. Or imagine a State of the Union special revisiting the strife of Baltimore. Any of these stories would tell us more about our country than the president will.

Frankly, I don't think any of those would get much of an audience.

That annual game probably accounts for a great portion of the SOTU viewers.

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.