[Mb-civic] Two Ideas Of Promise- David S. Broder - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Two Ideas Of Promise

By David S. Broder
Thursday, February 2, 2006; A21

The George Bush who stood in the House chamber Tuesday night facing 
members of Congress and a worldwide television audience was not a 
lame-duck president. When he said, in his peroration, "We will finish 
well . . . confident of the victories to come," he was making a promise 
to himself as much as he was encouraging the country's hopes for the 
remaining three years of his term.

But he is a diminished political force, weakened by events from the Gulf 
Coast to the Persian Gulf and by a loss of public support. In both tone 
and substance, this State of the Union address was closer to the one 
Bill Clinton gave in 1995, just months after the Democrats had lost 
control of Congress, than to the speech Bush delivered a year ago, after 
he and his party had triumphed in the 2004 elections. That speech was a 
trumpet call to confident GOP majorities to take on huge challenges -- 
from revamping Social Security to democratizing the Middle East. Tuesday 
night he was bucking up a nervous collection of GOP legislators, who are 
looking at the worst poll ratings most of them have ever seen, and 
trying to placate the Democrats.

The parallels to the Clinton address are striking. Clinton's plea to the 
politicians seated before him, a quarrelsome lot, as he well knew, was 
to "put aside partisanship and pettiness and pride" and "come together 
behind our common purpose." Bush, who knows he has squandered his 
mandate in even less time than it took Clinton, was also reaching out to 
the opposition for help. Near the top of his speech, he said that while 
policy differences are inevitable, they "cannot be allowed to harden 
into anger." He pledged to do his part to tamp down the fires.

Bush had good reason to be on his best behavior. Not only was he looking 
at an anemic 42 percent job approval rating in the latest Washington 
Post-ABC News poll but the tone of much of the pre-speech commentary 
also invited cynical reactions to everything he might say. The Post and 
the New York Times both ran opinion articles questioning whether the 
State of the Union address was anything more than a cheap bit of 
political theater. Some of what Bush did -- the labored rhetorical bow 
to the first lady, the too-familiar letter home from the Marine killed 
in Iraq and the introduction of his family seated in the visitors' 
gallery -- justified that cynicism.

But there were several points where I thought Bush's statements -- and 
the congressional reaction -- showed where some headway might be 
achieved. One, oddly enough, came at the most partisan moment of the 
speech. When Bush acknowledged the failure of his effort to add private 
accounts to Social Security, the TV cameras showed Hillary Clinton 
leading a derisive Democratic ovation at this "good news." When the 
president said in the next sentence that the problem of financing Social 
Security and Medicare for the retiring baby boomers "is not going away" 
but will only get worse because of Congress's inaction, it was the 
Republicans' turn to cheer.

And then he surprised both sides by suggesting a bipartisan 
congressional commission to tackle the big entitlement programs -- and 
all of the members cheered. Commissions are often devices for postponing 
action, but the only way to deal with this issue is through bipartisan 
agreement -- and Bush has opened the door to that possibility.

The other promising moment came when he endorsed the initiative to 
improve America's competitiveness by increasing federal funds for 
scientific research and training more mathematicians, scientists and 
technicians. As I wrote in December, this initiative had been teed up 
for presidential blessing by the National Academy of Sciences, spurred 
on by Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Democratic Sen. 
Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico. They now have more than half the Senate 
co-sponsoring their legislation, and the White House announcement that 
Bush's budget will provide $6 billion next year and $136 billion over 
the next decade means that we could see a breakthrough in the teaching 
of those subjects and the recruitment of workers with those skills.

His offerings on energy, health care and the budget were far more 
meager. But this initiative at least means the address could be more 
than a theatrical event.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/01/AR2006020101838.html?nav=hcmodule
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