President Obama receives a fragmented standing ovation during his 2014 State of the Union address.
WASHINGTON—Throughout President Barack Obama’s sixth State of the Union address Tuesday night, crowd reaction suggested the 114th Congress may get little done. The president highlighted jobs, fairness for the middle class, education, equal rights, renewed diplomacy and cybersecurity; the responses from members of Congress in the audience mostly fit along clear party lines.
Medill News Service clocked the applause index from inside the House chamber to quantify what was apparent from watching who was clapping – Republicans didn’t appear ready to sign on to Obama’s plans.
Defining a standing ovation as approximately two-thirds of the House standing, a partisan ovation as approximately one-half of the House standing, and applause breaks being pauses of five seconds or longer for clapping, we tracked the president’s “trigger” words and corresponding crowd reaction.
There were nearly 30 exclusively Democratic partisan ovations compared with just nine bipartisan standing ovations. Overall, Obama’s speech got the Democrats excited but Republicans kept to their seats by and large. In an interesting reach across the aisle, Obama drew almost exclusively Republican support for his comments regarding trade protection.
There were some light moments amid the tension. When the president stated he has no more campaigns to run, a smattering of Republicans clapped; Obama’s riposte that he’d won two campaigns already drew a loud cheer from the Democratic side. This boastful applause helps illustrate the divide in Congress.
Clark McPhail, who has made a 50-year career out of studying collective action response, finds it surprising how spontaneous applause can be. Whether or not a political party previously plans to clap, the length of the applause seems to be unpredictable.
“Whether it’s a political gathering, a religious gathering or a sport gathering, applause is more frequently unsolicited,” explained McPhail, a professor emeritus in sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Partially fueled by this pomp within the House chamber, the State of the Union address has become a television and, more recently, a social media spectacle; the sustained applause breaks and standing ovations are some of the more theatrical aspects of the whole phenomenon.
The report itself is required by the Constitution, which states that the president “shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union.”
But according to the American Presidency Project, the majority of American presidents have merely sent in this report as a letter, never appearing before Congress. George Washington and John Adams did deliver a speech, but no president would give the message in person again until Woodrow Wilson in 1913, according to the American Presidency Project
Since Wilson set the new precedent, only Herbert Hoover has gone through his entire presidency without giving a single annual address in person.
The House Office of the Historian shows that Calvin Coolidge gave the first radio address in 1923, and Harry Truman made the jump to television in 1947; the speech also formally became the “State of the Union Address” that year. Then Lyndon Johnson moved the address to prime time in 1965.
Tuesday night, television networks and websites—even the White House itself—broadcast the event worldwide.
As the event has evolved, it has grown longer. Prior to Bill Clinton, the addresses were about 40 minutes long. Now they easily fill an hour. Clinton delivered the longest address, at 1:28:49; he also gave the second longest, at 1:24:58. One reason for the time spike may by the recent tradition of sustained applause breaks and standing ovations. Some statements draw uniform support from the crowd; others reveal the partisan divide of Congress.
Columnist William Safire demonstrated this in a 1987 New York Times opinion column. He reported that Tip O’Neill, Democratic speaker of the house, instructed his party to emphatically applaud targeted words of Ronald Reagan to try to twist the meaning of Reagan’s speech.
GOP congressional leadership has suggested many of Obama’s past initiatives will be reversed with new legislation; the president has made it clear he will push back with veto power. He reiterated this in Tuesday’s State of the Union multiple times. The visible disapproval from the Republican side of the aisle—even on issues like civil rights for minorities and the LGBTQ community—suggests the GOP House and Senate majorities will clash repeatedly with Obama in his final two years in office.
