State of the Union preview. I go off on a tangent.
It’s tonight at 9:00 p.m. ET.
Tonight, Joe Biden will stand before Congress and the nation to give what will almost certainly be his most important speech of 2023. Last year, 38 million people tuned in to watch President Biden deliver his constitutionally mandated report on the state of the union. A similar number will watch tonight’s speech. Absent a major national event on par with the Space Shuttle Challenger crash or the operation to take out Osama Bin Laden, the audience tonight will be more than ten times larger than that of any other speech Biden will give this year. The speech will also receive a ton of press attention. It has already been the subject of approximately one million thumb-sucking think pieces. The State of the Union really is a tradition like no other.
The State of the Union is also a weird speech. It’s a grand venue with a big audience in the room and across the nation. Even the least presidential Presidents look somewhat presidential giving the speech. In many ways, the State of the Union is a high-floor, low-ceiling speech. It’s hard to screw up, but it’s also hard to soar. The history, the moment, and the setting can be very restrictive.
Every year, President Obama walked into the first meeting on the SOTU and declared that he wanted to do something different — make it shorter; make it more visually interesting; fewer policies, more stories, etc. And every year, he gave a very traditional speech because of the gravitational pull of the convention of the format.
Tangent triggered by the Challenger reference:
I woke up to a news report about seismic codes in Turkey where we watched buildings collapse on a loop Monday from the earthquakes there. Yes, there are updated construction codes in Turkey, but some buildings predate them and a lot of illegal construction circumvents those rules.
Scientific data is often precise and experimentally repeatable. Like the kind NASA practices, usually. But the Challenger blew up because decision-makers ignored the advice of people who knew the data best. Cold temperatures made the booster O-rings brittle. They launched anyway. I was in the dean’s office at engineering school when it happened.
Data is often a poor model of reality. Or it measures what it measures and not what it doesn’t. We should have learned that already with opinion polling. And yet.
“Sometimes stories tell you what statistics can’t.”
Whenever I hear the phrase, “data-driven campaign,” I shudder. Obama’s winning 2008 campaign was data-driven. So was Hillary Clinton’s in 2016.
Young, presidential-campaign staffers fresh off primary races and with visions of West Wing jobs dancing in their heads are all about data. Data is how superiors evaluate their job performance. How many volunteers, how many calls, how many knocks today? Get those 9 p.m. numbers filed on time. Hit your targets whether or not those numbers are meaningful. In 2008, Obama’s staffers measured supporter engagement. In 2016, Team Clinton seemed to measure measuring. Coordinated campaign staffers here knew what they were sending up the chain-of-command was crap, but it was what superiors asked for: numbers.
Campaigns and organizers on the ground sometimes have a cargo-cultlike relationship with data. They believe in data — more is better — whether or not it’s really telling them what they think it’s telling them. Often, it’s just eyewash used to justify an educated guess or to satisfy superiors’ need to provide metrics to the client.
I was an engineer for 35 years. Trust me. I woke up to that earthquake report after dreaming about a mechanical joint failure on the 36″ vapor line of a 200-ft tall distillation column for which there was lots of computer-generated data and stacks of paper justifying the design. You still lose sleep.