There was an episode of The Simspons a few years ago in which Springfield faced one of its many crises. Mayor Diamond Joe Quimby called a townhall meeting and pledged to create a “blue-ribbon commission” to investigate and address the emergency. One character responded earnestly, “Did he say a blue-ribbon commission?” Prompting another to say, “Well, you can’t do any better than that!”
I kept thinking of Quimby’s empty gesture while watching the president’s State of the Union last night because Bush’s pledges were nearly as vacuous and equally as ambitious. Last year, Bush insisted Social Security be privatized. This year, he politely asked Congress to create “a commission to examine the full impact of baby boom retirements on Social Security.”
Conservative pundit Fred Barnes recently wrote an entire book praising George W. Bush as the bold visionary of our times, willing to sacrifice temporary poll numbers to advance a sweeping agenda that literally changes the world. Last night, Bush proved Barnes wrong — the president’s 2006 State of the Union address was dull, but more importantly, it was small. Bush gets one chance a year to seize the spotlight with a national address before Congress that lays out a policy agenda for the nation. Last night, it seemed the president simply didn’t have much to say.
There was no new “ownership society” plan, no Mars mission, not even an assertive stance against steroids. For about an hour, we heard warmed-over rhetoric on everything we’ve heard from Bush for the last few years. It was like a greatest-hits package from a band happy to rest on its laurels. Of course, Bush hasn’t had a hit in years, so it may not have been the wisest of strategies.
Even all that talk about an ambitious new approach to health care turned out to be hype. By my count there were two paragraphs on the issue, mentioned almost in passing in the last third of the speech.
I noticed that Slate’s John Dickerson argued that it was a surprisingly partisan speech. That’s true, but it was partisan in an unproductive way. If you’re a conservative today, what’s the new game plan? On which parts of Bush’s national agenda are you ready to start working the phones? Everything the president mentioned that the right may care about — Iraq, Patriot Act, the tax cuts from the first term, tort reform — was already been on the table. A SOTU address is a chance for a president to lay out something new, but Bush didn’t want to.
Scott McClellan told reporters on Monday that Bush will follow up on the SOTU by traveling across the country to discuss “four key issue areas” in what McClellan described as “major policy speeches.”
After listening carefully to last night’s address, I haven’t the foggiest idea what those four issues might be.