My comments are not about President Obama’s State of the Union Speech itself but about the live audience for the speech. In response to a growing movement in the country encouraging bipartisanship, roughly 20 percent of Congress chose to sit for the speech in bipartisan fashion next to a member of the other party.

Essentially the entire Congress did that last year in solidarity with then-hospitalized Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. This year, however, a significant minority of Congress decided to continue the trend.

The poster children for this movement, if you will, were Sen. Kay Hagan, D-N.C., and Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, who sat next to each other for the State of the Union and were frequently shown on camera during the speech. McCain clearly was a “marquee” name for the bipartisan seating since it was only three and a half years ago that he was running against Obama as the presidential nominee of the Republican Party.

I apologize if I’m leaving anyone out, but the latest list I could find, courtesy of the “No Labels” organization that pushed the bipartisan seating issue, showed two North Carolina representatives joining the state’s junior senator in the symbolic crossing of the aisle. Those representatives were Republican Howard Coble and Democrat Mike McIntyre.

I just have to give kudos to North Carolina’s Hagan (along with Arizona’s McCain), Coble and McIntyre for their willingness to participate in this bipartisan gesture at the State of the Union address. Hagan, especially, by virtue of her significant on-camera time (again, thanks no doubt to the high-profile former presidential candidate seated next to her) did North Carolina proud.

Hagan and McCain were fun to watch, too. They didn’t applaud the same statements. They shouldn’t be expected to. They belong to different parties and have different commitments and perspectives on many issues.

At least once, Hagan stood and applauded while McCain sat stone-faced. Good for both of them. Sitting beside a member of the other party is just that. It doesn’t imply any abandonment of principle and it doesn’t indicate a lack of real difference on matters of policy. But it does suggest a willingness to listen and learn from each other. It suggests, further, a willingness to work together on areas of broad agreement. It seems to me that all Americans, regardless of our various ideological commitments, should welcome any increase in the extent to which members of the Republican and Democratic parties are prepared to listen to each other and seek common ground.

I noticed last year when the North Carolina Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church was meeting in Raleigh that the votes that were conducted by raising of hand indicated that people of very different views on the most controversial issues were sitting with each other.

Even now, it makes me smile.