How significant was President Bush's State of the Union address? Andrew Sullivan articulates one conservative view on his website, saying simply that "[t]he development of Bush Republicanism took another step." But David Brooks of The Weekly Standard goes much further. Brooks calls the speech "transformational," arguing that Bush "[reshaped] the foreign policy of the most powerful nation in the history of the world" and "laid the groundwork for building a permanent Republican majority."
Liberals should perk up their ears at this -- if only to be aware of the full scope of current GOP aspirations. It's not just what Bush said about Iraq or Iran in his speech, but how he attempted to define the terms of debate for the upcoming political season. Bush is transparently seeking to become a transformational president whose presence dominates post-September 11 politics for years -- or decades -- to come.
Before the attacks, Bush's prospects for greatness seemed limited. There was no major crisis at home or abroad; Ronald Reagan's legacy still defined much of our politics; and the central question was who would break the electoral deadlock that has persisted since 1996 by building a working political majority.
Karl Rove, Bush's political guru, understood this. A history junkie, Rove modeled Bush's campaign and governing priorities after William McKinley. This seemed a strange choice to many -- McKinley is not generally seen as a great president. But as Rove pointed out, he did help the GOP to adapt its polices to reach out to new groups and build a lasting majority coalition.
Like McKinley, Bush had no bold plans to create a new political order once in office. Compassionate conservatism was an attempt to adapt and redefine the existing conservative project, not overthrow it. Then September 11 happened.
As Brooks observes, Bush now has a realistic opportunity to become a president who defines the terms of American politics long after leaving office. In his book The Politics Presidents Make, the Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek argues that transformational presidents engage in "the politics of reconstruction," in which they build a new political regime in opposition to the crumbling and de-legitimized order they have replaced. Examples include Franklin Delano Roosevelt after Herbert Hoover and Ronald Reagan after Jimmy Carter.
Seen in this light, the State of the Union address can be read as a conscious attempt to define an entirely new order. In it, Bush elaborated a vision of a moral America defending freedom with an extensive domestic anti-terror apparatus at home and an interventionist and open-ended war on terrorism and rogue states abroad. "[T]his will be a decisive decade in the history of liberty," he said. "We've been called to a unique role in human events."
In addition, Bush's entire domestic agenda has now been re-conceptualized in terms of security, from "security in retirement" (pension reform, Social Security privatization) to "economic security" (education reform, energy production, free trade, tax cuts). Finally, Bush endorsed national service as a component of homeland defense and to promote an ethic of personal responsibility and civic virtue.
Both Brooks and Sullivan stress the way Bush's speech focused our attention on the continuing terrorist threat, and appealed to character and national service in order to capture the moderate/independent middle. True enough. But this analysis fails to capture the fact that Bush has left the box of 1990s American politics altogether, defining a secure and moral future against an insecure and self-indulgent past. Skowronek says transformational presidents "retrieve from a far distant, even mythic, past fundamental values that they claimed have been lost." Reagan, for example, described his "Revolution" as "a rediscovery of our values and our common sense." Here's Bush: "After America was attacked, it was as if our entire country looked into a mirror and saw our better selves."
On its own, this may seem obvious -- America was self-indulgent in the 1990s, we did fail to take the threats against us seriously, and the war on terrorism is incredibly important. But just as Reagan broke from and stigmatized old-style liberalism, Bush can now frame Democratic opposition as representative of a discredited, Clintonian past. Call it "changing the tone" squared. Concerns about missile defense, civil liberties or the wisdom of overthrowing rogue regimes like Iraq can be portrayed as dangerous and self-indulgent, the echoes of a dying era.
This framing is especially hard for Democrats to counter because most will not stand in stark opposition to the Clinton legacy as Bush is. And as it becomes common wisdom, fair or not, that Clinton failed to do all he could to prevent 9/11, Bush's politics will increasingly come to seem a much-needed corrective. Like Al Gore, Democrats may find themselves unable to offer a compelling vision that breaks as clearly from the past.
