Free Republic

At some point during tonight’s State of the Union, President Barack Obama will likely glance up and to the left of his podium, gesture toward the gallery, and mention one of the unknown Americans seated in the first lady’s box. This year their names include Edith Childs and Earl Smith, but insiders have a different name for them: “Skutniks,” in reference to the first everyday American invited by a president to embellish the State of the Union. Lenny Skutnik was a local hero, a Congressional Budget Office employee who plunged into the frigid Potomac after an Air Florida plane crash...

You can measure the scale of an American president’s troubles by the number of skutniks he deploys during his State of the Union address. Every year during his big set-piece speech to Congress, the president will digress from the main thrust of his remarks to offer fulsome praise to some member of the audience in the gallery. This person will have been carefully selected in advance by the president’s speechwriters as an exemplar of some virtue and placed there for the purpose. The television producers will have been alerted in advance so that at the right moment, as the president...