As a political geek, I look forward to State of the Union addresses, no matter who’s president. These speeches, at a minimum, nearly always make for great political theater, and capture the political world’s attention. I usually enjoy the spectacle of it all.
Bush, for all of his many tragic flaws, is capable of delivering a decent speech, just so long as we put the merit of his ideas aside while listening. With this in mind, last night was just … boring. Anticlimactic. Void of soaring rhetoric and almost anything of any interest at all. The speech and its delivery 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.
Tony Snow said Monday Bush cannot “cease to be bold,” which in retrospect, is almost comical for a president whose delivery and agenda appeared to be on Dramamine. Indeed, I kept waiting for the bold and/or provocative ideas that marked some previous SOTU address — a mission to Mars, invading Iraq, privatizing Social Security, rebuilding New Orleans, banning animal-human hybrids — but none came.
The president declared early on, “We can work through our differences and achieve big things for the American people.” Which big things? He didn’t say. 12 hours later, I’m still wondering.
Indeed, these speeches generally begin with a built-in applause line and morale booster: “The state of our union is strong.” Last night, perhaps unwilling to make the claim that few Americans actually believe, Bush saved the line for the very end, at which point it drew no applause at all.
Dana Milbank noted that “both sides were unusually calm on a night where the yawns nearly equaled the cheers.” For a beleaguered White House, anxious to use the power of the presidency to get back on track, that’s not exactly the desired response.
Even his attempts at graciousness became insults.
President Bush departed from the prepared text of his State of the Union address to graciously congratulate Nancy Pelosi on her history-making selection as the first female Speaker of the House. Then he departed from the prepared text a second time to take a jab at Pelosi and the rest of the new Democratic majority of Congress.
In the prepared text of the speech, sent out by the White House some 40 minutes before Bush ascended the House rostrum, the president was to say, “Some in this Chamber are new to the House and Senate — and I congratulate the Democratic majority.” When Bush delivered the line, however, he paid tribute to the “Democrat majority.”
Dropping the “ic” from the word “Democratic” may seem insignificant, but it was almost certainly a deliberate move by Bush, who has used the phrase “the Democrat Party” for months as a way of needling his opponents.
It was that kind of night. Bush couldn’t even read a simple complement off the teleprompter, without mangling the grammar to be insulting.
As a rule, presidents 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. Republicans in Congress were unimpressed with the speech; I know Democrats were unimpressed; and based on early polling, the electorate in general was unmoved.
I’ll get into more of the policy/substantive details in subsequent posts (including a run-down of Sen. Webb’s tremendous Democratic response), but my general reaction to the speech is, the State of the Union is lethargic.
