Among the people who actually watch the State of the Union, few stay tuned in for the other party's rebuttal. Even fewer watch the followup speeches from fringe members of the President's own party. Who cares who all gives a followup speech? The whole thing is a non-story.
For one thing, the SOTU rebuttal is a dead end. If you give a solid speech, you get no attention. If you do something dumb (Rubio / water, Ernst / plastic bags, etc), your career trajectory stops right there. It's why the GOP is sending a loser like Kim Reynolds out there.
Most of the people who want to hear the rebuttal aren't going to sit through a SOTU from a President they hate, just to hear the rebuttal. And no one knows what time the rebuttal is going to start, so no one tunes in just for that. The rebuttal only goes viral if you screw up.
As far as a few House Democrats giving rebuttals to the rebuttal or whatever you'd call it, zero minds are ever changed by this. It's just an excuse for the media to hype the imaginary "progressive vs centrist House Democrat schism" when that's not even how the lines are drawn.
In that sense, the speeches directly after the State of the Union are similar to the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary, in that the media hypes them to high heaven ahead of time, and then they never to have any impact on where things head after that.
I think we should have all 435 House members each give their own SOTU response speech, one after another, Jerry Lewis telethon style, until one of them finally passes out at five in the morning, and that person has to spend the next week sitting next to Majorie Taylor Greene.
I threw that joke in about Marjorie Taylor Greene at the end of the thread, just to prove a point: despite being pointless and not even a funny joke, it got more likes than most of the tweets in the otherwise important thread.
Everything in punditry is a reality show contest.
Everything in punditry is a reality show contest.
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