Sure, legislative staffers have to leave the building in which the Governor is speaking in order to watch him give the State of the State address from the Triangle, but there's no way we'd all fit into the gallery anyway. Plus, the reporters need the seats more than we do. Plus, beer.
Plus, no one is there to stop you from laughing along when the Governor compares the state budget to an experience he had his freshman year of college, while home in Alaska during Christmas break. He was trying to drive from Delta to Valdez with a high school friend (and former cheerleading captain, apparently, though most recently she served as the Commissioner of the Department of Natural Resources....), and it was 40 below, and parts of the transmission kept falling off the car, but they managed to maintain one gear: reverse. They drove backwards, heads stuck out the windows in the cold.
Alas, now it is the entire state that is "heading into hazardous territory in a substandard vehicle," as the Governor put it. That got a good laugh, and a few grimaces.
Or when he told the assembled room that last summer, he had helped celebrate the 2 billionth salmon caught in Bristol Bay (at least, during the modern commercial fishery).
"The fish was symbolic of the abundance and quality that is the basis of Alaska’s subsistence, recreational, and commercial renewable resource economies," he said. "It was also delicious."
Partisan divides are immediately forgotten as the entire room of elected Senators and Representatives stopped him with applause. Rural, urban, Republican, Democrat, legislative, executive, House and Senate, independents and secessionists -- when the Governor of Alaska talks salmon during the State of the State, you are clapping. We like our Governor, but we love our king.
