There are those who have been savvy enough to capitalize on their time in the spotlight. Most returned to the work they were doing, while holding on to a little of the magic from a night many simply describe as “surreal.” Others simply returned to obscurity, quietly resuming their lives.
Some have briefly carried their stardom forward, using the momentum of the public appearance to secure policy changes and local acclaim. Not all are named in the speech, but some are mentioned in what end up being the most emotional and memorable moments of the night-like Carryn Owens, whose husband was killed in a raid in Yemen before President Donald Trump invited her to his address last year, or the more than two dozen citizens affected by gun violence for whom President Barack Obama declared in 2013, “They deserve a vote.”īut what happens after the speech ends, after members of Congress and the Supreme Court file out of the House chamber, after the pundits say their piece and the balcony guests go back to their daily lives? Beyond those 15 minutes of political fame, the experiences that follow the monumental recognition of being a State of the Union presidential guest vary widely. In the quarter-century since then, nearly 100 guests-sometimes called “Skutniks”-have been publicly honored during the State of the Union. It’s a tradition that goes back to Ronald Reagan, who, during his 1982 address, honored the “spirit of American heroism” in Lenny Skutnik, a Congressional Budget Office employee who had jumped into the icy waters of the Potomac to help rescue passengers in a plane crash.
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