Dear Vice President Biden and Speaker Pelosi:

Dear Vice President Biden and Speaker Pelosi:

I watched President Obama's State of the Union speech the other night, and I found the constant stream of standing ovations to be a major irritant.

Excessive standing ovations that characterize events like this do not encourage me to tune in. I'm pretty sure the same is true of many people.

One of the most important parts of Mr. Obama's speech was about three quarters of the way through, when he spoke of the loss of faith in institutions, CEO's rewarding themselves for failure, TV pundits reducing serious arguments to silly sound bites and politicians cutting each other down rather than lifting the country up. The place was quiet. People seemed to be assimilating the message rather than making sure to clap and cheer louder.

I'm glad the cheer-leading had subsided by that point because, otherwise, by then I would have changed the channel.

Please stop the overdone cheer-leading. It wastes time, detracts from the message and squanders the impact of a real standing ovation.

Stop it. Thank you.

Sincerely,

Steve Sturgill