Once again, last night, our nation’s president performed his constitutionally mandated obligation to deliver his report on the state of our union. Tens of millions of people tuned in. With another election right around the bend, President Biden repeated his soon-to-be slogan “finish the job” like some incantation. He was feisty, defiant and energetic.

And amid it all, eloquence didn’t stand a chance.

Clocking in at 72 minutes, the speech was a slow slog, zigzagging from the nation’s obligations to the LGBTQ community one moment to opposition to Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine the very next. The speech lurched and droned, stitching anecdotes, grand plans and minor boasts together with thin patriotism, partisan jabs and appeals to unity in roughly equal measure.

Headlines will likely focus less on anything Biden said and more on the Democratic president giving as good as he got from heckling Republicans.

How did it come to this?

The problem has little to do with the elderly president himself — his inability to distinguish poetry from talking points; his hurried, fumbling delivery; his shouty emphatics. Nor does it have much to do with the political position in which he finds himself — his approval ratings stuck in the low 40s, Republicans now in control of the House and supermajorities of the American public convinced that the nation is going in the wrong direction.

The problem, really, is with the State of the Union itself.

The clapping – the endless, interminable clapping – doesn’t help. And neither does the stuffy setting and tired rituals that define this antiquated ceremony.

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