To me, one of the most uncomfortable features of the contemporary State of the Union speeches is the shout-out to people in the gallery, often in the first lady’s box, as exemplars of some quality the POTUS wants to praise or use as an example for the viewers’ edification. I doubt very much that the drafters at the Constitutional Convention had such Oprah-esque bathos in mind when they called on the executive to report to the legislative branch on the state of the union.  

As so often happens when progressivism runs amok, the practice has now descended to the level of self-parody. Brent Scher reports in the Free Beacon:

The woman whose story of economic recovery was showcased by President Barack Obama in his State of the Union address is a former Democratic campaign staffer and has been used by Obama for political events in the past.

Rebekah Erler has been presented by the White House as a woman who was discovered by the president after she wrote to him last March about her economic hardships. She was showcased in the speech as proof that middle class Americans are coming forward to say that Obama’s policies are working.

Unmentioned in the White House bio of Erler is that she is a former Democratic campaign operative, working as a field organizer for Sen. Patty Murray (D., Wash.).

This also wasn’t the first time the White House used the former Democratic campaign staffer as a political prop. Obama spent a “day in the life” of Erler in June so that he could have “an opportunity to communicate directly with the people he’s working for every day.”

Quite obviously, Obama is running out of real people and is reduced to using the equivalent of those Styrofoam columns back in Denver in 2008.  Either that, or his staff is just phoning it in, secure in the knowledge  that the MSM will not expose their fabrications.