10 Most Memorable State of the Union Moments
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President Obama took the High Court to task for its Citizens United decision in this address: “The Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections. I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities.” Justice Samuel Alito (appointed by George W. Bush) was seen shaking his head and mouthing the words “not true.”
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Just as President Obama was articulating that his health care reforms would not cover illegal immigrants, Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) interrupted by blurting out, “You lie!” Vice President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi looked on, horrified. Obama responded to Wilson by saying, “That’s not true.” Wilson later apologized and was publicly rebuked by the House.
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Said President Bush, “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” This statement became known as the “16 words” on Iraq and uranium and critics cited it as a faulty premise for the invasion. Ambassador Joe Wilson wrote a July 2003 op-ed in The New York Times disputing Bush’s claim; a week later, Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, a covert CIA officer, was outed by columnist Robert Novak as a perceived punishment for disputing the president. The scandal led to a criminal investigation; Scooter Libby, then chief of staff to VP Dick Cheney, was ultimately convicted of a felony.
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Referring to the countries of North Korea, Iraq and Iran, Bush talked of an “axis of evil” in this SOTU when making the case for going to war against Iraq. “States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world,” said Bush. “By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred.”
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The U.S. had endured a series of government shutdowns when Clinton declared in this address, “The era of big government is over. But we cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves. Instead, we must go forward as one America, one nation working together to meet the challenges we face.” Columnist Ronald Brownstein wrote that month, “No other sentence in [Bill Clinton’s] 61-minute speech so dramatically captured the ideological climate that defines American politics – or the narrow line Clinton hopes to walk to reelection.” Clinton’s approval rating jumped from 46 percent to 52 percent post-speech and he was reelected that fall with 49.2 percent of the popular vote over Bob Dole and Ross Perot.
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Poking fun at both himself and the media during his first State of the Union address of his first term, Ronald Reagan mentioned the Father of Our Country, who of course delivered the first regular annual address to Congress on January 8, 1790. Said Reagan, who was the oldest president at age 69 when elected in 1980, “For our friends in the press who place a high premium on accuracy, let me say: I did not actually hear George Washington say that.”
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Lenny Skutnick was a CBO assistant when Air Florida Flight 90 went down in the Potomac River in Jan. 1982. Skutnick saved the life of a crash victim and was invited to attend Reagan’s first SOTU. “We saw the heroism of one of our young government employees, Lenny Skutnik, who, when he saw a woman lose her grip on the helicopter line, dived into the water and dragged her to safety,” Reagan said in this SOTU; Skutnik received a standing ovation. Since then, other ordinary Americans invited into the presidential gallery and honored during the SOTU have been known among the Washington press corps as “Lenny Skutniks.”
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The embattled president was forced to acknowledge the unfolding Watergate scandal in his address before Congress. “I would like to add a personal word with regard to an issue that has been of great concern to all Americans over the past year. I refer, of course, to the investigations of the so-called Watergate affair. As you know, I have provided to the special prosecutor voluntarily a great deal of material… I believe the time has come to bring that investigation and the other investigations of this matter to an end. One year of Watergate is enough.” By August of 1974, Nixon had resigned from office and Gerald Ford took his place.
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In 1964 the poverty rate was nearly 25 percent; over 40 million Americans were living on less than $3,000 a year. President Lyndon B. Johnson chose to declare war on unemployment and the conditions that caused this economic pain. “Unfortunately, many Americans live on the outskirts of hope – some because of their poverty, and some because of their color, and all too many because of both. Our task is to help replace their despair with opportunity. This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America … Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it.”
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One of the most memorable SOTU moments was Franklin D. Roosevelt's declaration of the “four freedoms” in his Jan. 1941 address: “In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression - everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way - everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants - everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a worldwide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor - anywhere in the world.”
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