Obama’s Guests

In Mexico and the world, politics are composed by a set of rituals and messages. Tonight in the U.S.A., we will see one of the most important for any president: the message he gives in Congress on the state of the country.

The State of the Union — which usually occurs in January, except when the inauguration of a new president takes place, and then it gets moved to February — is the moment when the president can approach the public to show the agenda he intends to carry out in accordance with Congress and the executive’s priorities for the following months.

Within this ritual, those accompanying the first lady as her guests are a clear indication of where the president wants the spotlight to be focused.

Last year, among the guests accompanying Michelle Obama was a young dreamer, an immigrant favored by the executive action on the subject: the NBA star, Jason Collins, who a few months earlier became the first sports superstar to publicly admit to being gay, and two survivors of the attack on the Boston Marathon.

This year, Michelle Obama’s guests give us a strong indication again of the path Obama wants to take in the upcoming months.

Of the 22 guests, first of all, Alan Gross’s presence draws attention, the United States Agency for International Development employee who was in a prison in Cuba for five years, accused by the Castro regime of being a spy, and who was released at the end of last year after the historic announcement of re-establishing bilateral relations.

Malik Bryant will also be there, a 13-year-old boy who decided to ask Santa Claus for just one thing this year: safety. “I just wanna be safe,” is what he wrote to Santa. His letter was sent to the White House through an organization, instead of the North Pole.

Another letter that reached the White House was the one from Ana Zamora, a student who arrived in the U.S. a newborn, and who has celebrated all her birthdays there since the first one, but has no papers and therefore remains in that country as an undocumented immigrant.

Two years ago, she benefited from the Dream Act, which stopped deportations of students who had no criminal record for a certain amount of time, and now her parents can benefit from the executive action that Obama signed at the end of 2014 in order to avoid separating families.

Ana will be there tonight in the first lady’s box.

Along with Malik and Ana Zamora, another six guests will be there tonight with the first lady for having written a letter to the president. Among the thousands of letters that Obama surely receives every day, eight guests might not be many, but the message of “I see you, and I hear you” seems to me to be motivating, seen from a Mexico where politicians are almost always disconnected from the common people.

In another interesting ritual, during the State of the Union address, the executive appoints a designated survivor. This is a member of the Cabinet who meets the requirements to become a president, whose name and location remain unknown until the State of the Union address ends, and which, in case of a deadly attack to the House chamber during the presidential speech, would assume the leadership of the executive.

In the absence of the president and the constitutional line of succession, the survivor is appointed as the new president. That is contingency planning!