President Bush's 2003 State of the Union Address was a forceful presentation of just about everything good and bad about the Bush Administration. It showed a President willing to concede his entire economic policy to the bad economics, the anti-government extremism, and the greedy, sticky fingers of his conservative base. And it also showed a President confident enough of his conservative support to build a rhetorical Potemkin village of insincere, unworkable or underfunded domestic initiatives on health care, energy, education and social services, designed to neutralize Democratic proposals and offer "compassion" on the cheap.
Typically, one of the best sections of the speech, a moving citation of the toll of AIDS in Africa and a new commitment to spend $10 billion on the problem over the next five years, represented an abrupt reversal of the earlier Administration position, probably at the behest of new Senate Republican Leader Bill Frist.
And in the most immediately significant part of the speech, on Iraq, the President combined a very effective indictment of Saddam Hussein's incorrigible record of contempt for international law and the United Nations with his own barely contained contempt for multilateral institutions.
In equally typical fashion, the rhetorical "lede" of the speech was a bold and brave demand that we cannot "pass along our problems to other Congresses, other presidents and other generations." He may be true to that credo in dealing with Saddam Hussein, but on domestic issues, the Bush Administration is all about passing along problems to the future, if not making them worse.
Some specific observations:
On the economy, the President decided once again to please his base and defy reality. For the first time, he publicly endorsed the false idol of the conservative movement, supply-side economics. He insisted that big tax cuts for the few would produce growth and avoid deficits, when all he has to show for his last big tax cut is the slowest job growth in 58 years and record-breaking budget deficits. Polls show the public isn't buying it. The speech is unlikely to change that.
On health care, the President embraced the idea of Medicare reform and modernization, but it sounds like his proposal is little more than a revival of earlier experiments to use managed care plans to cut Medicare costs while expanding benefits to include prescription drugs. He will elaborate on the proposal today in Detroit, but so far, it's just a lot of smoke.
On energy, the President called on Congress to enact his production-heavy energy proposal, and then pledged relatively small dollars to make the whole thing irrelevant through hydrogen technology. It's the right idea, but without a sufficient commitment of money or other incentives, amidst too many contradictory policies. Moreover, it appears conservative activists succeeded in getting any references to global climate change out of the speech.
And on "compassion," the President just sent back the same Faith-Based Organizations legislation that his allies in the Senate have rejected, and called again for community service after not lifting a finger to keep House Republicans from killing more money for AmeriCorps.
On all these initiatives, and on the global AIDS commitment, the President said some good things, but pledged fewer resources altogether than he wants to spend on new tax cuts for the wealthy. This indicates that he believes avoiding "double taxation of corporate dividends" and accelerating other tax cuts is more important than fighting AIDS, providing Rx coverage, investing in hydrogen technology, or helping people of faith address social problems altogether. And the President said nothing about funds to help state and local governments or to deal with homeland security, as Governor Gary Locke noted pointedly in the official Democratic response.
But it's on Iraq that the speech will have the most immediate impact for good or ill. As noted above, he did an excellent job of explaining to listeners at home and abroad that the point of U.N. inspections is not to determine whether Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction. The point is to verify, or call into question, Iraqi claims that the regime has already disarmed -- claims Baghdad is barely bothering to make in the first place, such is its contempt for a long series of U.N. resolutions.
While explaining how we got to the present crisis with Iraq, the President also, to put it mildly, maintained a credible threat that the United States would use military force if necessary to enforce the U.N. disarmament demand. Indeed, you half expected the Commander-in-Chief to order an attack in the middle of the speech.
But he failed to make Saddam's defiance of the international community and the U.N. the centerpiece of his indictment of Iraq; failed to directly call on the international community to support efforts to disarm Iraq; and failed to link the whole Iraq issue to a broader U.S. determination to promote international stability and the rule of law. Instead, much of his remarks suggested that Iraq was simply a threat to the United States and to U.S. interests in the Middle East; that support from other countries was strictly optional; and (by making it so personal) that this is essentially a fight between himself and Saddam. Thus, he lost the opportunity to reassure Americans that we are operating with the maximum number of allies and the highest possible level of moral authority, and that was a big mistake.
At one point in his speech, the President said: "The course of this nation does not depend on the decisions of others." That's obviously true if "depending on others" means France or Russia is given a veto power over U.S. foreign policy. But it's equally obvious that the opinions of our allies should influence U.S. policy, since our national self-interest can often best be promoted through alliances and multilateral organizations that we largely invented. The feral roar that arose from Congressional Republicans at this declaration of independence from the world, however, was a pretty good indication that they interpreted it as a primal commitment to American unilateralism.
And that sadly reflects another essential facet of George W. Bush: even when his instincts are right, he's always ready to appeal to the worst instincts of his supporters. In that sense, the speech was less about the uneasy State of the Union, and more about the sorry state of the Bush Administration and the Republican Party.
