State of the Union

So much for backing off the gas.

Some of the landed punditry thought the President would do a less aggressive speech last night, after the ambitious rhetoric of the Inaugural.

I was glad to see they were wrong.

I didn't try to liveblog the event - I've found it's easy to miss the forest for the trees when you do that. My daughter and I watched the speech, though - and our consensus was "he's spending some of that political capital he was talking about after the election."

As a conservative, I'm glad he mentioned the Gay Marriage amendment. As a small-l libertarian, I'm glad he only mentioned it a little, and moved on; he does have political capital, but spending it on gay marriage when there's a war to win and a tax system to reform would be like buying jewelry with the mortgage money. Gay marriage is a state issue, and the states are deciding it.

His domestic agenda was a troika of things that will alternately inveigle peals of joy and squawks of disdain from both sides of the aisle; education, healthcare and social security reform - led off by the call for fiscal discipline that so many on the right have awaited. At the end of the spending section, his tagline was "we should spend wisely, or not at all" - angling for the right.

He tacked right back to the left in his education section; "No Child Left Behind" may or may not be effective (I'm a detractor), but either way, it is a big government program.

There were two things that popped into the speech that surprised me; appointing Laura Bush to head a "three-year initiative to help organizations keep young people out of gangs, and show young men an ideal of manhood that respects women and rejects violence", and a federal effort to expand the use of DNA matching to validate death penalty convictions, and to train defense counsel to more competently represent capital defendants.

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It was, of course, in the foreign policy section of the speech that he took the Dems to school. He took the Democrats' nattering about "exit strategies" and kicked it to the floor; the exit will be when the job is done.

Good.

And he showed he'd learned the lesson of Reagan - and absorbed one of his own successes. He expanded, de facto, the "Axis of Evil", adding Syria (albeit not in as many words) to the spot vacated by Iraq. Emphasis is mine:

Syria still allows its territory, and parts of Lebanon, to be used by terrorists who seek to destroy every chance of peace in the region. You have passed, and we are applying, the Syrian Accountability Act, and we expect the Syrian government to end all support for terror and open the door to freedom.

His homage to the election was brilliant, and straight out of the Reagan playbook. The camera noted a number of men, apparently Arab, waving blue fingertips as they applauded. And Bush's guests in the gallery - Taleb al-Suhail, and the family of Marine Sgt. Norwood, killed in Fallujah - were the subject of the key moments of the speech. The cynic might say the moments were manipulative; the idealist would counter they were brilliant, and of course they're manipulative; speeches like this are intended to motivate, to lead, to inspire. Cynical or idealistic, the moment was stunning, straight from the Reagan playbook.

I'm going to swerve into conjecture here.

This was a speech that could only come from a man who knows he has momentum. A simple majority in the general election, control of Congress, some solid (if underreported) successes in the war and the economy, a good showing against his opponents in the Tsunami tragedy, and, biggest of all, stunning, unpredicted successes in the Afghan and Iraqi elections - Bush has had a good couple of months, has a roll of political mojo to burn, and he knows it.

And it shows.

Posted by Mitch at February 3, 2005 06:45 AM | TrackBack