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.

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 would address the legislature in person and did so every year for six years until he became ill. His Republican successors ventured only sporadically down Pennsylvania Avenue. Franklin Roosevelt, however, seized upon the idea of delivering his own messages, adding to them his brilliant flair for the spoken word. (It was under FDR that the number of applause lines and fumbled words became one of the marks of how successful or unsuccessful the speech was.) The address's name changed to the State of the Union Message, and radio, and later TV, started broadcasting it.

While Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy generally kept their messages detailed and dull, Lyndon Johnson dramatically transformed the address by switching it from noon to prime time in 1965 and, in doing so, introducing the TelePrompTer to the congressional chambers.

Everything changed. The big memo became the big speech, studded with rhetorical flourishes and shopping lists of programs the president wanted. Johnson began nine straight sentences with "I propose" in 1965 and then nine "I recommend"s in 1966. The next year, he topped that with ten straight "we have"s and ten more "we should"s. With his presidency under siege in 1967, he dropped to a mere five "let us"es. Nixon's speechwriters liked the idea, too, so they strung six "this can be"s in a row in 1971, seven "we believe"s in 1972, eight "five years ago"s and nine "we will"s in 1974.

Repetition has since gone out of style, but the catchiest idea of the LBJ years stuck: the war metaphor. If you want the public behind you, declare war. Ike waged War on Disease in 1954, but the 1960s were the heyday of the social war. "This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America," LBJ proclaimed in the 1964 address. "It will not be a short or easy struggle, no single weapon or strategy will suffice, but we shall not rest until that war is won." Subsequent addresses gave gloomy reports from the front.

In his first address, Nixon vowed to wage war on war metaphors. "We've heard a great deal of overblown rhetoric during the sixties in which the word war has perhaps too often been used. The war on poverty, the war on misery, the war on disease, the war on hunger." That said, Nixon still couldn't resist launching his own. "If there is one area where the word war is appropriate it is the fight against crime. We must declare and win the war against the criminal elements which increasingly threaten our cities, our homes, and our lives." But the lines of battle got confused in the next day's New York Times headline: "Nixon Pledges War on Pollution in State of the Union."

When they are not declaring war, presidents love telling us what's new. Woodrow Wilson started with his New Freedom, and we passed through Roosevelt's New Deal and Kennedy's New Frontier before the first "new" program popped up in a State of the Union. Once they started, they couldn't stop.

Johnson clearly preferred wars, but in 1965 he suggested a New Partnership between federal, state, and local governments to preserve the environment. (Nixon repackaged the idea under the War on Pollution and the New Federalism.) In fact, Nixon's 1970 address was big news for new-watchers. He declared the 1970s a time for New Beginnings, offered a New Road for America, and advised a New Approach in our dealings with Latin America.

But the biggest "new" in the 1970 speech was New Federalism, Nixon's plan to return power to the states. When Congress didn't oblige him, he offered different slogans a year later for the same idea--the New Partnership, the New Direction, and the New American Revolution. The slogan was new but the idea was old. In 1970: "It is time for a New Federalism in which . . . [power] will begin to flow from Washington back to the states and the people of the United States." In 1971: "The time has now come in America to reverse the flow of power and resources from the states and communities to Washington. . . ."

Striking out on his own in 1976, President Ford called "for a fundamentally different approach, for a New Realism that is true to the great principles on which this nation is founded." Between the branches of government, Ford declared, the nation needed a New Balance.

Ladies' underwear

With his first address, President Carter demanded both a New Spirit and a New Partnership between "those of us who lead and those who elect." That went nowhere, so the next year, relying on phrasemakers Fallows, Shapiro, and Hertzberg, he went whole hog with the New Foundation.

Without many initiatives to back it up, the slogan itself became a target. Russell Baker accused Carter of trying to "squeeze a last bit of political value out of the poor, tired old 'new' on the chance that there might be a little toothpaste left in the tube." Daniel Patrick Moynihan exacerbated Carter's problems when he whimsically noted that New Foundation appears in the first lines of the communist "Internationale," the Soviet anthem until 1943. The New Foundation eventually died an ignoble death in a hail of women's undergarment jokes.

The crash and burn of the New Foundation might have spelled the end of "new," but Ronald Reagan gave it new (oops) life. In his 1982 address, in addition to calling for another New Beginning, Reagan asked for adherence to his year-old call for a New Spirit of Partnership. Who was this new partnership between? If you guessed federal, state, and local government, you're almost right. Reagan included in the New Partnership branches of the federal government. The press had by this time dubbed Reagan's New Spirit of Partnership, New Federalism.

Reagan wasn't done. In 1985, he tried New Freedom and then added, "The time has come for a great New Challenge, a Second American Revolution of hope and opportunity." The New Challenge part was original, but the Second American Revolution bears a strong resemblance to Nixon's New American Revolution.

Do you recognize the phrase "the time has come?" You should. That was also how Ford heralded his New Realism and Nixon his New Partnership. And that's not all. In 1968: "The time has come when we must get to those who are last in line . . ."; 1970: "The time has also come for better emphasis on developing better ways of managing what we have . . ."; in 1971: "The time has come to take a new direction . . .."

Just to round out the slogans, I should mention Carter's crowd-pleaser that wasn't. "The first slogan I tried to sell to [Carter] was the "Beloved Community," said Hendrik Hertzberg at a 1983 conference. "[We] dropped it into the end of the 1978 State of the Union speech, but it failed to attract any notice, partly because we didn't do any backgrounding on it . . .." In other words, they forgot to tip off the press to make a big deal out of it.

In recent years, the State of the Union has become what James David Barber calls the Johnny Carson show of presidential addresses, complete with its own guest stars. In fulfilling his constitutional obligations, Reagan has introduced heroes in the balcony, like crash-victim savior Lenny Skutnick and Harlem antidrug crusader Mother Hale. While other presidents have quoted from works like Paine's Common Sense and Tocqueville's Democracy in America, Reagan found a gem in Spielberg's Back to the Future. "Where we're going, we don't need roads," he said in his 1986 message. It was all part of the make-the-president-forward-looking campaign that spawned other State of the Union winners like the Orient Express (Dulles to Tokyo in two hours maybe, $500,000 tickets definitely) and the space station ($30 billion, at best). In the House chamber, Republicans yelped and hollered, and Democrats applauded cooly. Across the country, ratings were low.