The Nation

Few presidents in the history of the United States have been given the opportunity handed George W. Bush to lead the nation to higher ground.

No president, with the possible exception of the current chief executive's father, has ever blown so great an opportunity so completely.

Maintaining an approval rating that "popular" presidents such as Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton would have gladly traded a vice president to register, Bush could have used last week's State of the Union address to turn a moment of rare national unity and resolve into the stuff of greatness.

The president could have announced that the U.S. would not merely lead an ill-defined war on terrorism but also a dramatic war on want at home and abroad -- declaring that the success of food drops over Afghanistan had inspired him to forge an international coalition to provide food to every starving region on the planet.

The president could have recognized the reality that disease poses the deadliest threat to humanity and accepted a challenge from Pennsylvania Republican U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter to dedicate an additional $1 billion in U.S. funding to the Global Fund to fight AIDS. He could have gone a step further and endorsed the call by the Health GAP Coalition for a commitment of $2.5 billion to fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria -- with its wise focus on filling the funding gap for programs that treat people with HIV in impoverished nations.

The president could have acknowledged the basic economic truth that, with the dramatic increases in military spending he is proposing, it will be impossible to keep the vague promises his speech featured in regard to job creation, extension of health care coverage for the newly unemployed, pension protections, cleaning up the environment, implementing a patients bill of rights, providing affordable prescription drug coverage for the elderly, raising home ownership rates, training more teachers and expansion of early childhood development programs.

The president could have admitted that, in a time of economic stagnation, a farm crisis and rapid deindustrialization, it no longer makes sense to restructure tax policies in order to provide massive tax cuts for the wealthiest 7/10ths of one percent of Americans or to rebate 15 years of tax payments to the nation's largest corporations. By simply announcing that the U.S. would maintain the tax rates that were in place when the country's economy was growing rapidly in the late 1990s, Bush could have freed up more than $500 billion for investment in rebuilding America's crumbling infrastructure and schools -- along the lines of a plan proposed by U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., to create jobs and more stable communities.

There is so much the president could have done with all his polling popularity.

Instead, he squandered it -- much as his father did the 91 percent approval rating he achieved in the Gulf War year of 1991. Indeed, Bush the Junior borrowed a page from his father to suggest that the American people ought to take responsibility for keeping presidential promises. The Bush of the moment devoted much of his State of the Union's address's scant domestic-policy section to promoting a variation on Dad's old "thousand-points-of-light" scheme. Young Bush is now busy touring the nation to sell this new vision of volunteerism as the cure for what ails America.

Let's be clear: There is nothing wrong with volunteerism. It has long been the favored activity of those "do-gooder liberals" Bush backers such as Rush Limbaugh routinely savage.

But the most ardent proponents of volunteerism will tell you that a few hours of community service should never be seen as an alternative to the serious commitment that is needed from the federal government to address the problems that plague American communities -- let alone the world.

"One hopes the president doesn't think (America's) needs will easily be met by his call for two years or 4,000 hours of volunteer service from every American. Having called for such commitment all my life, I don't believe the problems in neighborhoods (that are impoverished) will ever be solved without a massive political and societal commitment to match citizen action," explains Jim Wallis, author of books such as "Faith Works" and "The Soul of Politics," and a man whose "Call to Renewal" activism on behalf of increased citizen involvement in problem solving is so well regarded that Bush aides have sought his advice on such matters.

"When it comes to terrorism, America pledges its full commitment to whatever resources it takes, but when it comes to poverty, America calls for volunteerism," argues a disappointed Wallis. "The president says we will ‘act at home with the same purpose and resolve we have shown overseas.' That promise remains unfulfilled. I was especially disappointed that President Bush called for welfare reform that replaces ‘dependency on government' with the ‘dignity of a job' without an expressed commitment to make work really work for the millions of people who are now off the welfare roles and working, but remain in poverty."

While most television commentators remain ridiculously enthusiastic about Bush's State of the Union speech, the editor-in-chief of Sojourners magazine offers a more sober -- and sobering take.

"I really like presidential talk about values, and we saw some fine language (in the State of the Union address) about turning away from the ethic of ‘if it feels good, do it,' and moving from ‘the goods we can accumulate' to ‘the good we can do.' I particularly liked the call for a ‘culture of responsibility' that ‘serves goals larger than self.' We indeed must ‘change our culture,'" notes Wallis. "But values have to be implemented to have any value. And a country dominated by a commitment to endless war abroad and volunteerism at home will fall far short of the best values expressed (by George W. Bush)."

He sure didn't leave the Democrats much room to maneuver. When George W. Bush delivered his first State of the Union address--a two-ply speech divided between a so-called war on terrorism and a supposed war on the recession--he depicted himself as a Rooseveltian president, as in both (Republican) Teddy and (Democrat) Franklin Delano.

In Speech One, Bush warned the war on terrorism--now targeting "tens of thousands of trained terrorists" throughout the world, in jungles and in cities--has only just begun and may extend for years beyond his time in office, and he declared himself a roughrider ready to take this war to nations that are "threatening America or our friends and allies with weapons of mass destruction." Never referring to Osama bin Laden by name, he announced that North Korea, Iran and Iraq--especially Iraq--were in his crosshairs and noted, "I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer." In other words, if those wimpy coalition partners don't have the stomach for this, if Americans, as heroic as they were on and after September 11, are not be ready to invade Baghdad, none of that will matter. Bush will still lead the charge.

In Speech Two, he came across as a New Dealer. Without providing details, he called for extending unemployment benefits and direct assistance for health care coverage, for strengthening Head Start and early child development programs, for enhanced teacher training and recruitment, for a Patient's Bill of Rights, for extending Medicare to include coverage of prescription drugs, for protection of 401(k) plans and pension fund protection (without mentioning a certain belly-up energy company), for greater accountability within corporate America. He said he was in full favor of "jobs." There was no standard-fare GOP rhetoric about the need to limit big-government or the wonders of unfettered, entrepreneurial capitalism.

This was calculation, not conversion. Taking a cue from Bill Clinton, Bush has learned the value of strategically appropriating portions of the rhetoric and policies of his foes. His Medicare drug prescription plan is meager. It would devote about $77 billion for medication for only the poorest of senior citizens. Even Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert has suggested spending $300 billion in this area. His Patient's Bill of Rights? Bush, no surprise, didn't say how far he is willing to go in permitting consumers to sue HMOs. And while he urged the lawmakers sitting before him to work "on these important domestic issues in the same spirit of cooperation we have applied to our war against terrorism," Bush was not above sticking it to the Democrats by pressing those items that cause them to see red: ballistic missile defense, Social Security privatization, a pro-industry energy bill that plunders the Alaskan wilderness, and his tax cuts. (He asked Congress to make the ten-year tax-cut legislation passed last year permanent.)

Karl Rove and Company could be proud of the speech, for it provided few openings to the opposition. One cliche among Washington commentators has long been that the Republicans are the Daddy Party (the warriors, the tough-on-crime guys) and the Democrats are the Mommy Party (the gang that worries about health care, education, and such.) Bush was striving to be both Ma and Pa. Seeking the holy grail of most presidents--a strategic political realignment--Bush is attempting to turn the GOP into the Both Parents party, which smites enemies abroad and then tucks you in when the economy falters.

The Democrats have already signaled they have no intention of undermining Bush's daddy credentials. So far they have pledged no-questions-asked loyalty to Bush as the commander-in-chief. Will any prominent Dems now challenge Bush on his intention to expand--unilaterally, if need be--the war on terrorism, or on his blank-check attitude toward military spending? Regarding foreign policy matters, Bush has rendered it tougher for the Democrats by making sure not to sound only like a go-it-alone militarist. He pledged to double the size of the Peace Corps, as part of an initiative to create a USA Freedom Corps, which, he said, "will expand the good efforts" of AmeriCorps. Thus, Bush was celebrating and building upon the accomplishments of John Kennedy and, yes, Bill Clinton. And he even got a bit Wilsonian. He loftily remarked, "America will always stand firm for the non-negotiable demands of human dignity: the rule of law, limits on the power of the state, respect for women, private property, free speech, equal justice, and religious tolerance. America will take the side of brave men and women who advocate these values around the world--including the Islamic world." Now there's something for the princes of Saudi Arabia to consider, as well as Bush's not-so-freedom-loving allies in Turkey and Uzbekistan. The President just placed the United States on the side of dissidents in these nations and elsewhere. Was he serious? (Don't email me; that's a rhetorical question.)

So what was House minority leader Dick Gephardt to do when he delivered the Democratic response to Bush's speech? He surgically attached his party to the President on matters of war and homeland protection. (There is "no daylight between us" on the war of terrorism, he assured the public.) And when he offered the Democrat's domestic agenda, it did not seem that distant from what Bush had proposed: helping the unemployed, recruiting high-quality teachers, protecting pensions. Gephardt, of course, referenced that particular energy company.

There were a few differences. Gephardt advocated raising the minimum wage and providing a tax deduction for the first $10,000 spent on college tuition. He took a glancing shot at Bush by opposing "gambling" on Social Security privatization. And he cried out for campaign finance reform. But Gephardt presented little to distinguish Democrats from Bush in a meta way. Confronting a wartime president with an approval rating somewhere in the area of 137 percent, Gephardt and other Democrats cannot bring themselves to bash Bush as a tool of Big Bidness--or a conservative ideologue or anything else. Gephardt did not question Bush's intentions or overall aims. He did not even mention the tilted-to-the-rich tax cuts Bush rammed through Congress.

Perhaps Democrats are hoping that in this election year Americans who vote will eventually pay sufficient attention to the policy fights of Washington to conclude the Democrats are indeed the better mommies and that voters will believe that even during a war economic concerns come first. But with the Democrats praising Bush's performance as a daddy, and with Bush using his wartime-enhanced standing to score points as a mommy, there is not much of a contest at the moment between Bush and the Democrats.

"Those of us who have lived through these challenging times have been changed by them," Bush said toward the end of his address. That surely is true for him. As crass as it may be to suggest, he was lucky September 11 happened on his watch. (It's easy to believe those post-9/11 reports that quoted Clinton saying he wished he had been confronted with such a tragedy.) But, as this speech demonstrated, Bush--now an amalgamation of TR, WW, FDR, JFK, WJC and (don't forget) RR--and his posse have been damn smart in figuring out how to make the most of it