Brief Summary
The Set-Up
The State of the Union is one of the president's biggest homework assignments. Rain or shine, the Constitution stipulates that he let Congress know what's going on. In election years, it's also a good chance to stump, or campaign.
The Text
In modern State of the Union Addresses, the president usually goes down a laundry list of issues that he wants to work on in the upcoming year. 1996 was no exception. In the speech, President Clinton names seven challenging areas for the government to take on across the entire spectrum of domestic and foreign policy. Every issue from school uniforms to toxic waste gets a shout-out.
Rarely, a State of the Union enters the history books for signaling a major shift in the direction of the country. Bill Clinton's 1996 speech fits this description. When Clinton declared "the era of big government is over," he essentially said that he was willing to start governing as a moderate or conservative…even though he had passed some pretty liberal policies in his first term.
He also made liberalism sound a little less mainstream. Imagine if Lebron James said "the era of dunking is over," and you have a sense of how surprising it was.
It was a smart chess move, and it paid off when he won reelection. Clinton's subsequent signing of a welfare reform bill, which he challenged Congress to write during the 1996 State of the Union, reshaped social policy for the next two decades.
It didn't quite kill the New Deal, but it definitely helped make "big government" (and even sometimes "liberal") dirty words in American politics going forward.
TL;DR
Let's work together to improve our government by making it smaller and more efficient…oh, and by the way, vote Bill Clinton in 1996!