by Frank James
President Bush’s final State of the Union speech is scheduled to start in less than an hour. Your devoted Swamp reporter is in the House Press Gallery where all of us journalists–reporters and photographers-are waiting until the doors leading into the chamber itself are opened.
It promises to be a historic night: this is the first time the Bush Twins, Jenna and Barbara, have deigned to come to the SOTU.
More importantly, the next POTUS may be sitting in the room. Sen. Barack Obama is supposed to attend tonight. I believe Sen. Hillary Clinton is scheduled to be here too.,
My Swamp mate, Mark Silva has already set up the themes of tonight. The president will hit the Iraq War and the economy hard. He’ll also inveigh against earmarks.
In a yearly ritual, we are being shown the short video that instructs us how to put on the emergency hoods in the event of some kind of terrorist attack that involves poison gas. As we do every year, we journalists laugh at the part where we are informed to breathe normally if we must don the hoods and run for our lives. Right. . We won’t be live-blogging the speech since print journalists aren’t allowed to bring laptops inside the press gallery seating area that’s actually in the chamber. Ditto cell phones and cameras.
We’re waiting for the final security sweep of the press gallery by the bomb-sniffing dog before we are finally seated.
The world’s press corps is here. Well at least the German press corps is here. Several German journalists next to me were just having a spirited conversation about “Obama” and “Chicago.”
Looks like they cancelled the security sweep. We must all look fairly harmless.
We’ll try to post something as soon after the speech as we can.