Site Presented By
Monday, Nov 23, 2009
In his State of the Union address, the president posed once again as the indomitable wartime leader -- but it didn't play as well this time.
Jan 21, 2004 | As they prepared for Tuesday night's State of the Union speech, President Bush, Karl Rove and Bush's speechwriters were faced with a choice. The latest poll showed that Americans still supported Bush on national security and the war on Iraq, but were increasingly worried about his economic policies. Which way should they play it?
The war-leader card was Bush's only proven winner: Keeping Americans in a state of more or less permanent fear, and more or less permanent war, had bailed out what looked until 9/11 like a presidency headed for disaster. As long as he was sending American troops off to fight evildoers somewhere, Bush -- who before the terror attacks came across as a sharp-elbowed, ill-educated frat boy whose sole mission in life was to roll over for corporate America -- suddenly morphed into a kind of combo pack of FDR and Churchill.
So there was a strong argument to keep banging the national security drum. On the other hand, if people really were less worried about terrorism than their next paycheck, or their nonexistent health insurance, the national security theme, no matter how many inspiringly patriotic applause lines his speechwriters could work into it, might suffer the fate of Howard Dean's throat after he emitted that weird post-Iowa rebel yell. And Bush and Rove knew they needed to capture a key swing vote: Americans who support Bush's shoot-first-ask-questions-later approach to national defense but are deeply uneasy about his handling of the economy. They knew that merely swaggering around in a flight suit was not enough this time, that the guns needed to be lubed up with a few sticks of butter. But should guns come first, or butter?
In fact, it was a no-brainer. Following the venerable football philosophy that you dance with the one that brung you, Team Bush decided to keep the focus on the war on terror -- and keep the terror alert coded red. To be sure, in his speech Bush dutifully went down the domestic laundry list: everything from No Child Left Behind to his new immigration proposal to retirement savings accounts to an appeal to Congress to make his massive tax cuts permanent. (The latter drew, if not quite the raucous heckling of opposition members in the British Parliament, audible grumblings from Democrats.)
But the whole domestic part of Bush's speech had an oddly perfunctory quality about it, as if the GOP strategists had realized that they had to offer something on these subjects to counter the Democrats but couldn't muster any real enthusiasm except for their eternal hobbyhorse, cutting taxes. There was no soaring, uniting rhetoric, no overarching themes (except for the repeated invocations of the Almighty, which play well with Bush's evangelical base but sit very uneasily with this Jeffersonian agnostic) and little evidence of the "compassionate conservatism" that Bush the Younger was supposed to bring to the White House.
The one notable exception came, ironically, in a brief coda to Bush's intolerant comments about the "sanctity of marriage," which warned that the American people might answer "activist judges" who recognized gay marriages with a constitutional amendment. Bush followed this expected sop to his right-wing base (and opening salvo in a crucial campaign issue) by saying, "The outcome of this debate is important -- and so is the way we conduct it. The same moral tradition that defines marriage also teaches that each individual has dignity and value in God's sight."
Perhaps it's just that we've become so accustomed to performances featuring Bush the Avenging Angel, Scourge of the Taliban and Smiter of Saddam, that seeing him talking about upgrading the electrical grid (a topic that seemed to be introduced solely so that he could get off the line "and reduce America's dependence on foreign oil") feels weirdly anticlimactic. Or it may be that the GOP already attained political nirvana when the massive, irresponsible tax cuts were rammed through (with the connivance of invertebrate Dems) and they really had nothing left to say or do. Or that the Bush administration was listening to the increasingly ominous economic rumblings coming now even from Republican insiders, warning that the $500 billion deficit Bush created by his outrageous tax cuts could not be sustained -- or that Washington Post/ABC poll showing that 58 percent of Americans believe that the economy is the biggest problem facing the country (compared to 39 percent who named terrorism) and that 50 percent of Americans would prefer Democrats in Congress to handle the economy, compared to 43 percent who would prefer Bush. In any case, there was no real story line in Bush's address beyond "cut taxes" and "kill evildoers," and his delivery was not inspiring.
