What if the president gave a SOTU and it didn’t matter 24 hours later?

My son in 10th grade is currently taking an American government class so I think this was the first year he was aware the State of the Union address is a thing.  He was a little surprised that I was not planning on watching it last night.  I put it on for 5 minutes and then he understood.  Damn, are presidential speeches before an audience so annoying.  Plus, I had a Carolina Hurricanes game and Duke basketball game on at the same time.  But, most importantly, it just didn’t matter.  If you head to WP or NYT homepages right now, you’ll barely even find any evidence there was a state of the union address yesterday.  And any news on the policy fronts (e.g., “reset” on Covid and the fine plan to try and make Paxlovid super-available) are news whether the president talks about them in front of Congress or not.  Also, as I explained to him, it doesn’t matter what I, Steve Greene, think about the SOTU.  It matters what other political actors, especially the media, think about it.  And I got all that from the newspapers today (did you hear that Russia invaded Ukraine) and twitter.  

So, if you enjoy the political theater of the SOTU… enjoy!  More power to you.  But, let’s not pretend its anything more than that.  There’s almost no more likelihood of meaningfully changing any political dynamics than if Joe Biden had just taken the day off yesterday.  And, hey, Duke won big (but damn was that Hurricanes ending unpleasant).