The snark firestorm that exploded after a dehydrated Marco Rubio ran a duck-and-cover water-grabbing operation in the middle of his State of the Union rebuttal turned the senator's big debut into a big blah. Republican savior? Not quite—the wet whistler became the latest in an eminent line of has-beens who saw their stars flicker and fade as a direct result of giving a lackluster rebuttal. Or so we heard from the Internet, which saw a drab speech full of stale bromides—only one flux capacitor away from the 1980s, marred by that fateful sip of water—and not much else. 

During his 1982 State of the Union address, Ronald Reagan did something unusual. In keeping with his preference for locating heroism in ordinary Americans, he told the story of one Lenny Skutnik, an employee of the Congressional Budget Office who two weeks earlier leaped into the Potomac River to save a drowning woman in the wake of a plane crash. As Reagan described the event, the cameras swiveled to the gallery, where Skutnik was seated next to the First Lady. People loved it so much that it became a tradition, and every subsequent State of the Union address has featured a presidential shout-out to a regular American in the audience who has done something extraordinary.