Any clear thinking person who understands how TV works know that there had to be some staging, that there's no accident involved in why those two ladies hadn't been introduced to each other before. I'm not cynical and there's no doubt in my mind that it was a genuine moment, but I understand why that genuine moment happened during the speech not before. You can have genuine moments during staged events, live and semi-live (aka live to tape, recorded but largely unedited) TV is all about staging genuine moments. It's a matter of putting the right people together under the right circumstances and letting the cameras capture it, and there's nothing wrong with that kind of staging. That kind of staging captured some of the most memorable moments of TV, most good, some bad.
Think about this, we've all seen the WWII re-union photo of the sailor just about devouring his girl upon getting off the ship. It's one of the greatest photos that's ever been shot, merely thinking about it makes me mist up. It didn't happen by accident, a photographer found out a ship was coming into port and figured there'd be a good chance of some good photos so he went down and started doing what photographers are supposed to do: looking for that memorable event that he could capture on film. That's a form of staging, there's a reason why the military didn't bar journalists from the scene, and there's a reason that photographer went to the scene. Doesn't mean what happened wasn't genuine, doesn't make the photo anyless magical, at least not for me. Maybe some people just don't like to see the man behind the curtain.
Is it out of the norm for those honored by the President in the SOTU (a tradition started by Reagan) to be sitting in the same section (in this case, directly above)?
They may have been seated near each other to show the obvious contrast between the liberators and the liberated. That's not theater; that's political reality and should be re-inforced. Or that may have just been protocol. Somebody should look at past SOTU speeches to see; regardless, merely placing the women near each other suggests nothing in regards to "staging" in order to produce some "magic moment".
The issue is the hug: I don't think anyone saw that coming and if you're not debating that, then your overall point really has no merit. But what you seem to be saying is that the PR guys (as Chrissy calls them) put these gals next to each other because they "expected some magic" and I think that's a little more than a stretch. If anything, they just expected the two women's mere presence to speak for itself.
"Maybe some people just don't like to see the man behind the curtain."
And we all know who the "evil genius" is don't we?