After watching the president’s 53-minute address to Congress last night, I feel pretty comfortable saying the state of the Union is … listless, frustrated, and ready to move on. That applies equally to Bush and his audience.
The funny thing is the Bush White House has been offering something of a mixed message for the better part of a year. On the one hand, the president and his team insist that Bush will not “cease to be bold” and that he is looking forward to a “sprint to the finish line.” On the other, Bushies have been trying to lower expectations about this year’s SOTU, leaking word that the president would offer nothing dramatic this year, and would break no new ground.
On the latter point, I half-expected that the White House was trying to execute some kind of public-relations strategy. The Bush gang would tell us in advance of the speech that the president would offer a scaled-back vision of unfinished business … and then surprise everyone with his ambition and innovative ideas.
After all, there’s usually something of note in these State of the Union addresses. In recent years, Bush has presented at least some outside-the-box thinking on issues ranging from Social Security to immigration to “animal-human hybrids” to steroids to Mars exploration. Not too terribly long ago, the president even presented a governing vision in the form of an “ownership society.” (Remember that?)
But for all the pomp and circumstance, and grand political theater, Bush stood before the national spotlight for less than an hour last night, and just didn’t have much to say. If one is willing to suspend critical thinking skills, the president is capable of reading a decent speech, but as was largely the case last year, the entire address felt obligatory. The president might as well have just skipped the event altogether — he showed up, rehashed some old ideas, and left. It was a futile exercise in going through the motions.
As president, Bush is, for all intents and purposes, contractually obligated to say, “The state of the Union is strong.” It usually comes early on, helping set an optimistic tone. Last night, the president saved it for the end, mentioning it almost in passing. I got the sense he didn’t want to make a claim that very few Americans are willing to take seriously.
The conventional wisdom going into the speech was that Bush would have quite a bit to say about the economy. That would make sense — the president needs to reassure investors (here and internationally) and demonstrate to the country that he recognizes the seriousness of the challenge.
But as David Kusnet noted, even this portion of the speech left the audience wanting.
There is very little wrong with the economy, and Congress needs to act immediately to fix it.
That was the peculiar logic of President Bush’s perfunctory discussion of the nation’s economic problems in last night’s lackluster State of Union Address. At a time when many Americans fear losing their jobs, their health insurance, and even their homes, Bush devoted only 149 words to a discussion of the downtown and his proposals to pull the country out of it. Remarkably, not one of those words was the “u” word–unemployment–or the “s” word–stimulus–much less the dreaded “r” word–recession. Nor was there any recognition that the nation faces structural economic problems, such as persistent poverty and growing inequality, or even the cyclical problems that the Republican presidential candidates, particularly Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, have acknowledged.
Instead, Bush addressed Americans’ economic anxieties with a weird point-counterpoint paragraph structure. For instance, he began by saying: “As we meet tonight, our economy is undergoing a period of uncertainty. America’s added jobs for a record 52 straight months. But jobs are now growing at a slower pace. Wages are up, but so are prices for food and gas. Exports are rising, but the housing market has declined.”
This was scarcely an exercise in empathy towards anxious Americans, and it certainly isn’t an explanation of what is wrong with the economy. There was no mention of what caused the collapse of the housing market, how it affects American families’ finances, nor how the “uncertainty” spread to the credit system generally, not only nationally but internationally as well.
Leon Panetta, former White House chief of staff under Bill Clinton, noted yesterday morning, “Normally, these State of the Union speeches can be pretty drab.” Last night would be different, Panetta said, because the country “is in deep economic crisis” and Americans are looking for answers from their political leaders. That sounded like a reasonable expectation, but Bush has a way of letting the nation down when it comes to providing sought-after answers.
Rahm Emanuel’s response to the address couldn’t have been better: “At a time when the challenges facing our country and our economy have never been greater, the American people are looking for a new direction and new leadership from Washington. But tonight all the American people heard from the President was the same old rhetoric and the same old ideas. The time has come to reject the status quo, and to trade no ideas for new ideas; lethargy for leadership.”
I’ll flesh out some of the policy specifics in subsequent posts, but when considering the big picture, I realized, about 10 minutes after the SOTU was over, that I couldn’t really remember a single line from the speech. As a rule, that’s not a good sign.
For years, presidents generally enjoy a modest post-SOTU bounce. Americans hear the president, see his vision, and watch members of Congress stand and applaud for him for nearly an hour. It’s a setting that makes almost anyone look good. The bounce usually fades shortly thereafter, once White House critics are able to start telling the public all the things wrong with the president’s agenda.
This year, I don’t think we’ll have to wait — there probably won’t be a bounce because there really isn’t an agenda. Instead, we have a president spinning his wheels, running out the clock, and anxious to let someone else clean up his mess.
Oddly enough, the best line I heard last night didn’t come from the White House’s speechwriters, it came from Barack Obama’s. In a video released by the senator’s campaign, Obama said, “Each year, as we watch the State of the Union, we see half the chamber rise to applaud the President and half the chamber stay in their seats … Imagine if next year was different. Imagine if next year, the entire nation had a president they could believe in.”
Whether it’s Obama, Clinton, or Edwards, I’d certainly welcome the change.