LAST night, George W. Bush gave the least consequential major speech of his presidency – and it was a brilliant political stroke.
Substantively, the State of the Union message was pretty much a bust – with an entitlements commission here, a Competitiveness Initiative there, here a commission, there an initiative, everywhere a commission and an initiative. Rhetorically, it wasn’t all that memorable – save for his line about America being addicted to oil, which was catchy but essentially pointless.
But politically it had two virtues. First was the Hippocratic virtue: Nothing he proposed last night will do any harm to him. Whether Commission A or Initiative B is welcomed or rejected by Congress, it won’t matter much.
Its second virtue was that it allowed him to spend a good deal of time reassuring a nervous public that he was focused on the primary tasks at hand.
The caution on display marked a change from last year, when Bush learned the cost of aiming too high in a State of the Union Address. He used the 2005 speech to launch his Social Security reform effort, a political calamity that came home to him last night when he was greeted with jeers and laughs from Democrats upon speaking the words “Congress did not act last year on my proposal to save Social Security.”
That’s putting it mildly. The president gave his opponents a stick with which to beat him and his poll ratings down for six months as he toured the country telling people disaster was on the way – which had the unfortunate consequence of convincing Americans that the economy was still in wretched shape when it was in fact in fifth gear.
Bush despises “small ball”; that has led him to advocate dramatic and visionary policies abroad and at home. Last year, he seemed to forget for a time that it ain’t “small ball” to focus on implementing his visionary policies, to see them take root and bear fruit.
Securing the future in Iraq, working to prevent terrorist attacks at home and seeing to it that his tax cuts become permanent – that’s pretty big ball right there. His mistake last year was imagining that he should add Social Security reform to that heavy load.
So what we saw last night was Bush the Calmly Determined in place of Bush the Visionary. His delivery was low-key and assured, just the right tone for a speech intended to assure the American people – or at least those Americans willing to consider his words with an open mind – that he knows where his responsibilities lie and what he needs to do to meet them.
However, if Bush really chooses to be a visionary leader in the delivery of his final two State of the Union speeches in 2007 and ’08, he could do so with a change in style and structure.
The nature of the executive branch turns all State of the Union Addresses into unwieldy laundry lists with off-the-shelf proposals that mostly go nowhere. But why? This is a tradition of no moment and little purpose. Any serious legislative proposal is formally introduced at a different time, often long enough after the president speaks that no one remembers its inclusion in the State of the Union.
The State of the Union message is always at its best, and always has the most meaning, when presidents address the question of the nation’s direction and its role in the world. Had Bush lopped off the last 25 minutes of last night’s speech, he’d have left the American people with a soaring sense of national purpose.
That dramatic excision would have highlighted the section of the speech that might prove to be its most important – in which he spoke directly to the people of Iran, saying “America respects you, and we respect your country. We respect your right to choose your own future and win your own freedom. And our nation hopes one day to be the closest of friends with a free and democratic Iran.”
Break on through to the other side, Mr. President. Let your people go. Revolutionize the State of the Union. You will have the thanks of a nation grateful that it need no longer be instructed about the possibility of using wood chips as a gasoline substitute.
