I found the first part of last night's State of the Union a bit dull, but then it really picked up steam. The most memorable moment, of course, was the emotional interaction between two women who had been invited by President Bush: The mother of an American soldier who had been killed, and the daughter of a man who had been assassinated by Saddam Hussein. The daughter still had the purplish ink on her finger, from the historic Iraqi election a few days ago.

In the video stream, it's fun to look over the attendees of the speech, and see how many were wearing purple. Many of the women wore violet or purple dresses, and many men wore purple shirts or ties. Some even had dipped their own fingers in ink (a gesture that I greatly sympathized with).

To get a sense of the high emotion of the evening, I recommend watching the video stream, at least where the President starts talking about Iraq, which is at about the 40-minute mark of the 54-minute speech. He introduces the daughter around the 43-minute mark, and she is clearly emotional as she stands and accepts the ovation. Then the longest applause of the entire speech, was when Bush introduced the soldier's mother a few minutes later, who was sitting right behind the Iraqi daughter. When they spontaneously hugged, I lost it. Even the newscasters got choked up.

Though it's not clearly seen in this video stream, when the two women attempted to separate last night, they got tangled up... The mother had been holding her son's dogtags, which got tangled in the Iraqi daughter's clothing, and all three of them (the soldier's mother, the Iraqi daughter, and the First Lady) worked on untangling things. The accidental symbolism, the messy humanity of the moment, made it that much more emotional for me. Even President and Mrs. Bush looked like they were fighting back tears.

State of the Union 2005