D.C. Diary: State of the Union

I was intending to write a learned blog today about Obama's first State of the Union address and the public and critical reaction to it. Unfortunately, although Obama may be this century's most eloquent President, he was no match for a stomach full of spaghetti meatballs, 8 weeks' worth of feeding in the early hours and too many late nights watching the Australian Open. We sat down to watch the coverage at 9pm and Simon fell asleep almost immediately - murmuring something in his slumber about waking him when Obama mentioned Afghanistan. I managed to keep my eyes open, but was unable to concentrate on a word of the President's speech because I was so distracted by CNN's fantastically funny Facebook feed.

We watched the SOTU address via CNN.com, which provided footage of Obama on the left of the screen and a window showing a live Facebook feed on the right. Wisely, the great American public chose to completely ignore Wolf Blitzer's banal prompts ('What do you think President Obama should say in his SOTU address'?; 'What do you think of President Obama's SOTU address?') and instead delivered a running commentary on the speech, publishing individual comments which refreshed every ten seconds or so. This is the type of blather which voices exactly what you are thinking but which the official political commentators could never say. A few of my favourites were as follows:

'That dress makes the FLOTUS's butt look big';

'Is this cameraman an intern'?;

'Pelosi is blinking WAY too much';

'Nancy looks like Skeletor';

'30 minutes before Biden sleeps';

'McCain looks like Tombstone from Marvel comics';

'1 drink for 'Wall Street', 2 drinks for 'Main Street'';

'Someone get the Supreme Court Justices a red bull';

and my absolute favourite...

'Did anyone see Mariah Carey at the SAG Awards? I thought she looked amazing'.

I'm not sure what all that says about the State of the Union, except that there's nothing like facile social networking sites for getting a snapshot of how the nation (or at least a certain section of it) is feeling. I am however fairly confident that the Founding Fathers wouldn't have been very impressed with any of the 34,678 posts which appeared on CNN.com last night.

Update: I just read the transcript. Sounds like it was quite a good speech, if perhaps a bit long. But we needn't worry about that for 2011, by which time the SOTU address will undoubtedly have been reduced to 140 characters.