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The State of the Union's speech in the United States is not only a constitutional obligation of the president, it is also a long-standing tradition in the country, which expects every year to hear its president address Congress with its government plans, demands and vision Of the nation.

Its history dates back to 1790 when George Washington, the first US president, delivered his "annual message" to Congress in New York, then the provisional capital of the country, an initiative that continued his successor, John Adams, but found a Third American president, Thomas Jefferson.

Because the US Constitution requires the president to report to Congress "occasionally" the "State of the Union," Jefferson sought to do his duty, but without attending in person, so that from 1801 until more than a century Then the presidents shall deliver this report in writing to the legislators.
It was only in 1913 that Woodrow Wilson regained the custom of pronouncing the message in person.

This decision came only a few years before the media explosion in the country, something Franklin Delano Roosevelt (president between 1933 and 1945) was able to take advantage of, being the head of state that made the most speeches, ten in person, and two in writing.

Roosevelt took advantage of the new technologies to reach the people as well. He made use of the proliferation of the radios and the news that passed in the cinemas to make public their speeches.

In view of the breadth of the public, the texts were not only limited to the enumeration of proposals and observations, but also developed more in relation to rhetoric.

It was not until 1945 that historians recognized their official name, "State Discourse of the Union," while throughout the 1950s, with the proliferation of television, it has definitely become a tradition for Americans.

Precisely because more and more families had televisions in their homes, President Lyndon Johnson (1963-69) changed the time from his traditional noon to late night time when more viewers could see him.

Since it became an entire tradition, the speech was postponed only once, on January 28, 1986, a decision made by then-President Ronald Reagan to learn of the accident suffered by the Challenger spacecraft.

Of all the "State of the Union" speeches, the longest in history was the last speech of former President Bill Clinton in 2000, 7,452 words in 89 minutes.

This year, the fifth to be given by Barack Obama, will be the number 92 of the speeches in the entire history of the country, and the 224th recital all that have been written.

His first speech as president in 2009, just weeks after taking office, focused on the need for an immediate economic recovery in the country and the turn that his administration assumed after the eight years of the George W. Bush administration.

In 2010, he called on Congress to resolve "outstanding issues" such as the health reform he was leading at that time, and in 2011 he focused his words on regaining the mood after the Democrats failed to win legislative elections in which they lost a majority in the House Of the Representatives.

The speech of 2012 was an eminently electoral speech, impregnated with his meeting with the re-election of that November, so some analysts point out that this is probably the most important speech on the State of the Nation for Obama, in which he will truly have to show what his Political agenda and hence what he hopes to achieve for the country.