Donald Kaul

Presidential State of the Union addresses tend to be like second marriages: triumphs of hope over experience.

President Bush’s recent speech was a lot like that, except that the hope seemed rather desperate.  It was a perfunctory list of national problem areas yoked to half-baked solutions.  Balanced budgets, more education, better health care, (ho-hum) fairer immigration laws, less dependence on foreign oil, (yawn) less global warming; all got their turn in the box, each to be rendered trivial by the tepid nature of the president’s response to their challenge.

Oh, and there was the war of course.  Having unveiled his “new strategy” just the week before, he didn’t have anything new to say.  Speaking to a Congress that was skeptical, if not openly hostile, his tone was almost plaintive.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, reaching vainly for Churchillian eloquence, “on this day, at this hour, it is still within our power to shape the outcome of this battle. Let us find our resolve, and turn events toward victory.”

I half-expected him to break into the old Neo-Conservative hymn: “All We Are Saying, Is Give War a Chance.” It would have cheered things up some anyway.

The speech had an eerie “Twilight Zone” quality.  It could have been given two years ago or four, for that matter.  None of the problems he mentioned were new.  It was as though someone else had been president for the past six years and left all of these messes to be cleaned up.

Actually, the messes are his.  It’s somewhat amusing that now, as he faces a Democratic Congress (or “Democrat” Congress, as he childishly insists on calling it) he speaks sternly of attacking global warming. You mean there’s global warming?  Who knew?

Perhaps he intends to trick the Democrats into actually doing something about these problems, thereby angering the electorate and sparking a Republican comeback.

If there’s anything the electorate hates worse than problems, it’s solutions.  Anything you do to solve global warming or save Social Security or give everybody health care or reduce dependence on foreign oil is going to cost people money or inconvenience or pain.  If it doesn’t do that, then it’s probably not much of a solution.

Which is the category Mr. Bush’s solutions fall into.  Give tax breaks to people too poor to pay taxes in hopes they’ll buy health insurance.  Balance the budget by making nickel-and-dime cuts in discretionary spending.  Reduce dependence on foreign oil by forcing car manufacturers to increase gas mileage by a mile-a-year for the next few years.

It’s a good thing Noah wasn’t anything like Mr. Bush.  When God told him a flood was coming, he’d have built a rowboat.

So lacking in confidence was the president that he didn’t even throw any red meat to his conservative base – nothing on gay marriage or flag burning bans or “activist” judges or the evils of stem-cell research.  (Neither did he mention the rebuilding of New Orleans, which he promised to do after Katrina and has not.)

And when he closed by saying that “The state of our union is strong; our cause in the world is right,” his heart didn’t seem in it.  It was a weak speech, weakly delivered.

You know a Presidential address is in trouble when it gets blown out of the water minutes after its conclusion by a nine-minute speech by a rookie senator making his first appearance on a national stage.

Jim Webb of Virginia, responding for the Democrats, delivered a simple and forceful message, based on facts:

Our leaders, he said, in taking us to war owed us “sound judgment, clear thinking, concern for our welfare, a guarantee that the threat to our country was equal to the price we might be called upon to pay in defending it.

“The president took us into this war recklessly…We are now, as a nation, held hostage to the predictable and predicted disarray that has followed.”

That hits the neo-con on the head.

Don Kaul, a former Washington correspondent, can be contacted at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it . Article distributed by www.MinutemanMedia.org.