So there was some speech or something, right?
Yeah. Truth is, I've virtually forgotten it. And that's after sitting in front of a room of people, wired to a live radio feed, heckling it in real time. Problem was, there wasn't much to heckle. Wasn't much to say. You can't add condiments if the cook doesn't first lay down the beef, and this speech was a "where's the beef?' moment. Where was my health care gottdammerung? I got my patriotism questioned, sure, but where was the insinuation of treason? Tonight's McCarthyism was more a pathetic plea for agreement and complicity than a brutal feint towards fascistic rhetoric. I'm glad we're going to do some work on cellulosic ethanol, but "clean coal" is like "renewable oil," it's the same old troubled resource, just now with a lying adjective tacked on to the front. Entitlement growth is going to create massive deficits, which is why we need to further blow a hole in our budget by locking in the tax cuts?
There was a real sense that the guy wasn't even trying. The speech offered no internal coherency, flitting from poll-tested initiative to poll-tested initiative with nary a nod towards bridging the two. In the service of rhetoric, reality stood no chance. We apparently offer health care to all our citizens (46 million uninsured can be wrong!) but are really groaning under malpractice costs. Same thing with earmark reform. Earmarks, by way of comparison, eat up 1 percent of the federal budget, malpractice costs are one half of one percent of total health spending. Transformative this ain't.
Maybe, in the weeks to come, Bush will push some policy initiatives. For now, I expect the alternative energy subsidies to go the way of the forgotten hydrogen subsidies from 2003. And remember that massive global AIDS effort we were going to fund? The one that ended up coming out of other disease prevention programs?
Bush's SOTU rhythm tends to couple big, offensive initiatives with progressive sweeteners he never pursues. This time, he proposed none of the former and tried to boost his poll numbers through exclusive, increasingly desperate reliance on the latter. Either way, the point is moot. There was no "there", there. I heard not a word on Medicare, the largest domestic initative of Bush's presidency, and apparently No Child Left Behind hasn't fixed our school system (though I did love the camera's pan to token Asian Elaine Chao when Bush went into math and science subsidies). Social Security reform prompted the night's best moment, when Bush complained about Congress's rejection and the entire Democratic half of the chamber jumped to their feet in vigorous applause. And that showed the reality of the evening: a lot of pomp, but little circumstance. The State of the Union, my friends, is strong, but the state of the presidency is weak.
