Reader's Guide to the State of the Union Address

The item immediately below this one, on our site, is the full 7000+ word official text of President Obama's latest State of the Union address, with a generous amount of marginalia from me. The first few paragraphs are intro about the circumstances and timing of "Year Four" SOTU speeches, given at the beginning of a presidential re-election year.

From that point on, if you do a mouse-hover over an underlined passage or anything that looks like a footnote, in blue, a little window will pop up showing side notes for that part of the speech.

Thanks to the Atlantic's Jennie Rothenberg Gritz and Clarissa Matthews for making this work. (In case you're interested, I started with a Word file of the official speech text and then inserted Word "comments" at the relevant points. We then ran it through a conversion routine to have the comments rendered into the HTML popups that you see.