State of Union offers old ideas, avoids problems

The president’s State of the Union speech is never only about the state of the union, which is always strong. It’s about atmospherics – who’s sitting with the first lady in the gallery, how many times the president’s party rises to applaud and the opposition remains seated.
Bill Clinton’s long, programmatic speeches got panned as laundry lists, yet Clinton always got a bump in the polls. President George W.
Bush’s short, thematic ones have risen on a few memorable phrases – axis of evil, addiction to oil – yet have come with few specifics or follow-through.
To divert Americans from the only thing on their minds — new troops being sent to a disastrous foreign adventure – the White House promised that Bush last night would put forth an array of domestic initiatives.
Compared with the few shirts and socks on Bush’s short laundry lists of the past, this State of the Union speech was a veritable wardrobe of ideas, even if some were old and frayed. He wants more money for his “No Child Left Behind” education initiative.
He wants to end “junk lawsuits” (that got the standing ovation of the night from Republicans) and an expansion of health savings accounts, a favorite of upper-income households looking for a tax break.
Having discovered there’s a crisis in health care, Bush proposed a convoluted tax-shifting system. The proposal would give a tax deduction to those buying their own health care and tax others with employer-based plans the president finds overly generous. This amounts to a penalty on the middle class for a fundamental necessity.
It may not be the worst health care idea in the 13 years since then-First Lady Hillary Clinton’s flawed attempt, but it’s close. And in the Democratic Congress, Bush’s plan has about as much chance of passage as killing the home mortgage interest deduction – which is to say, none.
Bush’s other big domestic initiative was to discover that he would have to do more than grant new subsidies to the natural gas, oil and coal industries to curb America’s substance-abuse problem with fossil fuels.
He put forward “20 in 10,” a proposal to cut gas consumption by 20 percent during the next decade by toughening fuel-economy standards and boosting the use of renewable fuels. This might fly. As Toyota Motor Corp. races past Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Corp., even Republicans must know that they did America’s carmakers no favor by protecting them from more stringent standards.
If President Ronald Reagan hadn’t refused to raise mileage requirements when he was in office, the era of a sport-utility vehicle in every garage – or the war in Iraq – might never have happened.
And imagine how much better off we would be if Bush had uttered the words “global warming” six years ago and acknowledged then that we must make “America’s environment clean,” or that failure to conserve would leave us “vulnerable to hostile regimes and to terrorists,” as he did last night.
Bush’s newfound concern is not a result of rising temperatures or oil prices but falling polls and a Congress dominated by the opposition for the first time in his presidency. Last week, Democrats easily passed legislation that would rescind $14 billion in Bush giveaways to oil companies and correct the boondoggle ignored by Bush’s Interior Department that failed to collect $10 billion in royalties for drilling on public lands.
Bush didn’t address the foremost issue – the surge in troops to Iraq that he announced on Jan. 10 – until about 3,000 words into his address. Then his only sustained applause came when he mentioned the troops.
The president’s finest moment came at the outset of the speech, when he said more than he needed to about “Madam Speaker” seated behind him, noting how proud Nancy Pelosi’s late father, once the mayor of Baltimore, would be of her.
After that gracious gesture, he gave away two gallery seats to uninspiring choices – multimillionaire basketball player Dikembe Mutombo and Julie Aigner-Clark, founder of Baby Einstein, a series of videos for anxious yuppie parents who can afford them. He got the third one right, a tip of his hat to Wesley Autrey, a construction worker who jumped under a moving New York subway train to save a stranger.
What will matter from this week is not Bush’s speech but what happened Monday in the Senate. John Warner, the ranking Republican member of the Armed Services Committee, presented a proposal that soundly rejected the president’s decision to send more troops to Iraq.
His resolution is reminiscent of the trip Senators Barry Goldwater and Hugh Scott made to the White House on Aug. 7, 1974, to tell Richard M. Nixon how grim his situation was and how few senators – “maybe 15” – remained on his side. Nixon resigned the next day.
Warner isn’t the first Republican senator to break with Bush. Sen. Chuck Hagel joined Democrats in an earlier resolution. But Warner is like Goldwater and Scott, not a maverick but a white-haired old lion of the establishment who comes in sorrow. If there were many who support Bush, as the president said in his speech, there will be fewer tomorrow and fewer still until he finally wakes up to the fact that there are some problems you can’t talk your way out of.

Margaret Carlson is the author of “Anyone Can Grow Up: How George Bush and I Made It to the White House.”