We're Caught in a Presidential Clap Trap

There can be no sound worse than more than two hands clapping, as those of us who watched President Bush's speech to Congress last week know. It was hard to keep track of what the president was saying because he was repeatedly interrupted by applause--88 times, according to ABC's Peter Jennings. Bush got so carried away by the audience he muffed one of his big lines: "Education is not my top priority," he declared firmly. Congress ignored the gaffe and kept on clapping.

This ritual of congressional approval has trivialized political discourse.

As with so much that characterizes presidential politics, the appearance before Congress took its basic shape under Franklin D. Roosevelt. It is in one of these speeches that Americans first heard FDR's impressive baritone say, "Yesterday, Dec. 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy," which captured the country's horror over Pearl Harbor. It might be said this also was the start of the presidential sound bite.

Four decades later, Ronald Reagan, the president who turned Roosevelt's constituency and politics inside out, also turned FDR's speeches to Congress on their ear by eschewing bad news in favor of sunny messages and sentimental "hero in the balcony" cameos. Reagan created "the Lenny Skutnik moment," after the man who heroically rescued survivors of a plane crash from the freezing Potomac River.

Since then, presidents have used their addresses to Congress less as arguments for their policies and more as a string of punch lines and guest appearances. Their intention is to signal the media and the American people that they have substantial support in Congress.

President Bush hit the clappers' trifecta with his own take on the Lenny Skutnik moment. He pointed to Rep. Joe Moakley of Massachusetts. (Applause). He wished him well in his fight against cancer. (Sustained applause). He said the best way to help Moakley would be to double the appropriation for the National Institutes for Health. (More applause).

Bush used the same approach with education: "I like teachers so much I married one." (Applause as Laura Bush stood up in the balcony, waving to, you guessed it: more sustained applause.)

The congressional applause-fest ensures that presidents look popular because no matter where the television editors cut the tape, somebody's clapping. And it lets television and print journalists quantify congressional support for the president--88 applause lines is very good, isn't it? Unfortunately, most reporters don't distinguish between applause by everyone and the president's party members clapping. Thus, last week, they concluded that bipartisanship was evident in the chamber when it is by no means clear that it was.