Last night’s State of the Union Address was an historic opportunity for the president to lay out his agenda for the next year, defend the achievements of his presidency so far, and finally hit back (if subtly) at some of his Republican would-be opponents.

For Columbia students, it was an opportunity to gather with other politically-minded students and discuss the most important issues of the day. And also to drink.

The Columbia Democrats, at least, had a drinking game going. They claimed that their game was “non-alcoholic,” but a source who attended this event last year says that’s unlikely. We’re not judging!

The score sheet is below (sorry it’s so crinkled; the tipster who sent it to us was probably drunk). We’ve looked over the sheet, and gone through the text of the speech to find out how many times each of the phrases or terms that required people to drink occurred. How many drinks were consumed? Let’s find out!  

One-drink categories

• “innovate” = 6*

*Believe it or not, the word “innovate” did not appear in the speech, but “innovation” did. I’ve counted those instances because they came about halfway through the speech, when everyone was probably too drunk to tell the difference anyway.

• Wall Street vs. Main Street = 1*

*Again, the phrasing’s not exactly the same, but the president talked about “the deficit of trust between Main Street and Wall Street.”

• Osama bin Laden = 1
• al-Qaeda = 2
• Iran = 4
• clean energy = 8
• healthcare = 2
• immigration = 2
• Fellow Americans = 1

Two-drink categories

• “leaner” government = 1 (x2 = 2 drinks)
• Qaddafi = 1 (x2 = 2 drinks)
• nuclear weapons = 1 (x2 = 2 drinks)
• “obstruction” = 1 (x2 = 2 drinks)
• global warming = 1(x2 =2 drinks)

“Shots! Shots! Shots!” categories

• China = 4
• “economy that’s built to last” = 1
• “class warfare” = 1
• hope = 1
• change = 4

The final tally

If the Dems kept to their campaign-year promises and imbibed every time they said they would, then each of them drank 47 times during the course of last night’s hour-long address (not counting the required two drinks for “if Boehner looks orange,” which I could not calculate because this happened for 100 percent of the speech).

Of course it would have been the shots that did the most damage, and drinking 11 of them probably didn’t help in comprehending the speech. On the other hand, 11 shots could easily have been considered a necessity if the Dems stuck around for any of the news channels’ post-speech “analysis” segments.