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Good morning, good afternoon, Good evening, wherever you are.

And welcome to the politics guys with your host, Jay Carson and Michael Baranowski.

Welcome to the politics guys. I'm Michael Baranowski, a political scientist at Northern Kentucky University.

My co-host this week, as always, is Cleveland area attorney and sometime Republican strategist Jay Carson. On Tuesday, President Obama

delivered his seventh and final State of the Union address. While the speech was avidly

followed by the political class, the general public responded with a yawn. The total viewership for the speech was 31.3 million, or 9.8% of all Americans, which is the

lowest ever recorded since Nielsen began tracking State of the Union ratings in 1993.

And the president promised to make his speech shorter than his previous addresses right at the beginning,

and he just barely

delivered on that promise.

At 58 minutes and 44 seconds, it was Obama's shortest state of the union ever, though he only

cut his best time by 66 seconds over his previous best.

That was back in 2013.

Of course, that's assuming that a shorter state of the union is a better state of the union.

And that's generally one of my default assumptions about these things.

...