ZippyTheChimp
February 1st, 2006, 07:58 AM
Lowered Expectations Reflect Political and Fiscal Realities
By Dan Balz and Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, February 1, 2006
Coming off his most difficult year in office, President Bush used his State of the Union address last night to try to give his embattled administration a new start, speaking expansively about his aspirations for the final years of his presidency -- but offering a scaled-down blueprint for governing.
Bush begins this election year far weaker than he was a year ago. The most telling evidence came on domestic policy. Last year, he used his State of the Union address to launch an ambitious plan to restructure Social Security. This year, with that plan not even coming to a vote in the House or Senate, he called simply for a new commission to examine the impact of baby-boom retirees on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
Instead, Bush put his domestic focus on the economy, health care and energy, problems of far more immediate concern to voters than the future of the government's retirement insurance program. If he hoped in 2005 to show he was grappling with issues of the future, last night he sought to reassure Americans that he understands why so many of them are unhappy with the direction of the country.
The president has never lacked for big ambitions, particularly in foreign policy, and he restated many of them last night. But his address lacked the rhetorical lift of some of his best efforts of the past, and the domestic policy agenda, although lengthy, included initiatives that have been around for some time.
In that sense, the speech was a reminder of how much the war in Iraq has drained the administration's energy and creativity, and how much it continues to define the Bush presidency. Before even turning to domestic issues, the president restated his determination to stay the course in Iraq, defended his controversial program of warrantless surveillance at home and issued another warning to Iran over its nuclear program.
Beyond Iraq, Bush's agenda is constrained by political and fiscal realities. Deep partisanship in Washington and the prospect of Democratic gains in the midterm elections lessen the likelihood of cooperation between the two parties on any issue of significance. Fiscally, the deep federal deficit and pressure from Republicans to cut spending restrain the president's ability to spend as significantly on domestic initiatives as he might like.
Down in the polls, Bush sought to frame the coming year as a time of potentially decisive choices on national and economic security, and he provided a vigorous defense of his policies at home and abroad, suggesting that his opponents would lead the country toward isolationism and protectionism. "We will choose to act confidently in pursuing the enemies of freedom, or retreat from our duties in the hope of an easier life," he said. "We will choose to build our prosperity by leading the world economy, or shut ourselves off from trade and opportunity."
He also pointed to two of his recent bright spots: the two newest members of the Supreme Court: Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who were visible in the front rows of the House chamber last night. Alito was sworn in earlier in the day after the Senate voted 58 to 42 -- largely along party lines -- to confirm him.
The humbling of Bush came in many forms last year. Slow progress toward stabilization in Iraq, Palestinian elections in which the radical Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, emerged victorious, and a growing threat from an Iran developing nuclear weapons have shown the limits of administration policies. Bush said he has "a clear plan for victory," but he offered no strong signal of an early return of most U.S. forces in Iraq.
Domestically, beyond the failure on Social Security legislation, House Republicans rejected Bush's immigration plan and Hurricane Katrina dealt a blow to the administration's claims to competence in the face of crisis -- while punching an additional hole in the budget. Republicans forced White House counsel Harriet Miers to withdraw her nomination to the high court. The tax-reform debate fizzled, and the administration walked away from the recommendations of the commission Bush had appointed.
Those setbacks forced White House officials to reassess a second-term strategy devised by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove. The chief architect of Bush's reelection, Rove had studied second-term presidencies and determined that Bush should pursue major changes in the first year of the second term, before political pressures eroded his clout. Events proved him wrong.
After Bush's poll numbers plummeted, White House aides started rethinking the fundamental assumptions about second-term possibilities. Bush was forced to scrap his agenda and also curtail his ambitions. The president was advised to focus most of his attention on Iraq, the centerpiece of his presidency, and other foreign policy hot spots.
The political environment has changed, too. Instead of talking about a broad political realignment, White House aides are simply trying to help Republicans keep hold of Congress amid a flurry of scandals that include the indictment of Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), the former House majority leader, and the plea agreement by former GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
The result was a speech last night written with far more attention to the politics of the moment. On energy, Bush called for reduced consumption of oil from the Middle East by 75 percent over the next two decades with the use of new technologies and alternate energy sources. Notably, he never mentioned his earlier goal of opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas development, a small concession to the Democrats who have repeatedly frustrated him on the issue.
His health care proposals aim at expanding coverage and portability of health insurance, relative modest proposals at a time about 45 million Americans lack coverage. But he said nothing about the new Medicare prescription drug program, an initiative Republicans once hoped to trumpet but has angered many seniors in its implementation.
On the economy, Bush made another appeal to Congress to make his tax cuts permanent, an issue that his political advisers see as a key contrast with the Democrats. His competitiveness agenda, which the White House said will cost $136 billion over 10 years, includes proposals to train more science and math teachers and to boost investment in science research. He made little mention of Hurricane Katrina.
Republican strategists said that, although Bush hoped to boost his standing with the public, his other primary audience may have been GOP lawmakers calibrating whether to buy into his agenda or go their own way as they prepare for the fall campaign. Tom Rath, the Republican national committeeman from New Hampshire, said the party's elected officials are not interested in grandly ambitious initiatives this year. "Nobody wants to spend time in an election year to make an ideological statement," he said.
Republican pollster Bill McInturff said elected officials would be calibrating whether the Bush agenda will produce the kind of legislative results they can run on in November. "The president is on softer footing than he was a year ago, and he needs to lay out a legislative agenda that deals with issues of day-to-day concern, like health care costs and gasoline prices, and talk about the issues people care about," he said before the speech.
White House officials described Bush's speech as more philosophical than the typical State of the Union address, but at this point the philosophical outlines of his presidency are well known. What will count in the year ahead are the results his policies produce. Legislative achievements may help, but what will be even more useful for Republican candidates is a president who has regained the public's confidence. That will take more than one speech.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
February 1, 2006
News Analysis
Bold Visions Have Given Way to New Reality
By DAVID E. SANGER
WASHINGTON, Jan. 31 — It was an evening for President Bush to confront America's anxieties — and his own.
Only a year after Mr. Bush stood in the House, describing in bold terms how he planned to spend the political capital he had amassed in the 2004 election, the president who addressed the nation on Tuesday evening was far less ambitious, his tone noticeably different.
The Texan who swept onto the national political scene six years ago talking about drilling for new energy supplies and preserving the American way of life vowed on Tuesday night to wean the nation from its reliance on oil. Instead of urging Congress to drill in the Arctic, the president who had waved off the critics who portrayed him and Vice President Dick Cheney as captives of the oil industry asked Congress to finance federal research into alternative fuels and lithium batteries.
A president who has rarely dwelled on the impact of globalization for American workers was suddenly looking over his shoulder at China and India, and committing the federal government to a quest for 70,000 teachers and 30,000 scientists to prepare American students for a new era of competition.
It was, in short, a speech rooted in some harsh global and political realities, and one unlikely to rank among Mr. Bush's most memorable. Instead of evoking the grand ambitions that have suffused his presidency since the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Bush emphasized the familiar and the modest. At a moment of partisan fervor, he offered an olive branch, reviving a pledge to lower the temperature. "Our differences cannot be allowed to harden into anger," he said.
Yet by any measure, Mr. Bush's options are far more limited than they were a year ago. Much of the momentum he boasted about in the days after his re-election is gone, some of it lost on a bold Social Security initiative that never took off, some washed away by the deeply disorganized federal response to Hurricane Katrina.
The budget deficit, rising again despite Mr. Bush's promise to cut it in half by the time he leaves office in 2009, effectively handcuffs him when it comes to new initiatives. The few new ideas he unveiled were largely thematic, not backed by broad programmatic initiatives.
Three years into the war in Iraq, Mr. Bush tried anew to strike a tone of optimism, saying that "we are in this fight, and we are winning." But he also bowed to the country's anxiety about finding a path out of a mission that seems to become harder each day, and he warned anew of the dangers of premature retreat. "In a time of testing, we cannot find security by abandoning our commitments and retreating within our borders," he said.
Mr. Bush's approval ratings, which soared over 90 percent in the days after the terrorist attacks, bounced around in the 30's last fall and now hover anemically in the low 40's. His party, beset by a lobbying scandal and a breakdown in discipline on Capitol Hill, is nervous about the coming midterm elections.
With three years left in his presidency, Mr. Bush is certainly far from that lame-duck moment he used to joke about on his campaign plane — that point in his second term when he said he would "quack like a duck." On Tuesday alone, he won two major victories, the confirmations of Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. for the Supreme Court and Ben S. Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Both appointments promise to leave Mr. Bush's stamp on Washington long after he has retired to his ranch and begun building his presidential library.
But in acknowledging on Tuesday that Americans face "a complex and challenging time," Mr. Bush was doing more than issuing a call for global engagement. He was also acknowledging that five years into his presidency, the citizens of the world's most powerful nation do not feel that their status has brought them security.
"He needs to reassure us on the economy, and reassure people there is a future they can be positive about," said Michael K. Deaver, the image maker who helped make Ronald Reagan — on whom Mr. Bush has tried to model much of his presidency — a master of optimism. "People have been saying no to that question everyone asks — 'Am I going to be better off a year from now than I am today?' — and that has been going on for the past two or three years."
Mr. Bush's prescriptions Tuesday night were largely familiar: making tax cuts permanent, keeping markets open, keeping health care costs down. What was new was his Advanced Energy Initiative, though the increases he proposed in clean-energy research, better batteries for hybrid cars and new ways of making ethanol largely piggyback on programs already under way at General Motors and Ford, Toyota and Honda, rather than charting a new course.
And his proposals to "encourage children to take more math and science" had echoes of President Bill Clinton, whose incessant talk of remaking the work force to meet the challenges of a global economy were often referred to derisively during Mr. Bush's first term as feel-good economics.
"Second-term presidents often gravitate toward foreign policy," said Doug Sosnik, who drafted many of those policies for Mr. Clinton. "What's happened to this president is that there is more pressure to attend to the domestic needs of the country. And it's hard, because he has less room to operate and less money to spend."
Mr. Bush has more leeway in the area of foreign policy, but even here, limits loom larger than they did a year ago.
Facing public hearings in February on his once-secret program to conduct eavesdropping, without the benefit of warrants, on telephone calls between the United States and abroad, Mr. Bush defended his order anew as "a terrorist surveillance program." He also argued, in an expansive reading of existing case law, that he had acted "based on authority given to me by the Constitution and by statute," an authority that he said the federal courts had approved.
In the face of Iran's defiance of full international inspection of its nuclear program, Mr. Bush declared that "the nations of the world must not permit the Iranian regime to gain nuclear weapons." But in contrast to the confrontational tone that suffused his State of the Union speech of January 2003, which made the case for confronting Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Mr. Bush made no threats about what would happen if Iran continued down its current path.
Instead, he struck a decidedly moderate tone, careful not to outstep the European allies with whom he is trying to repair relations. And he seemed to recognize, said Lee Feinstein of the Council on Foreign Relations, that "clearly Iran has more ways of making our lives difficult in Iraq."
It is worth remembering that Mr. Bush has more time left in his presidency than John F. Kennedy served in his. Three years is a lot of time, and as Mr. Bush proved after Sept. 11, it only takes one day to redirect a presidency. But the path he described Tuesday night aimed more toward the middle lanes he talked about so often in the early days after he arrived in the White House, rather than the shifting of tectonic plates that he tried to engineer in the past four years.
* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
By Dan Balz and Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, February 1, 2006
Coming off his most difficult year in office, President Bush used his State of the Union address last night to try to give his embattled administration a new start, speaking expansively about his aspirations for the final years of his presidency -- but offering a scaled-down blueprint for governing.
Bush begins this election year far weaker than he was a year ago. The most telling evidence came on domestic policy. Last year, he used his State of the Union address to launch an ambitious plan to restructure Social Security. This year, with that plan not even coming to a vote in the House or Senate, he called simply for a new commission to examine the impact of baby-boom retirees on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
Instead, Bush put his domestic focus on the economy, health care and energy, problems of far more immediate concern to voters than the future of the government's retirement insurance program. If he hoped in 2005 to show he was grappling with issues of the future, last night he sought to reassure Americans that he understands why so many of them are unhappy with the direction of the country.
The president has never lacked for big ambitions, particularly in foreign policy, and he restated many of them last night. But his address lacked the rhetorical lift of some of his best efforts of the past, and the domestic policy agenda, although lengthy, included initiatives that have been around for some time.
In that sense, the speech was a reminder of how much the war in Iraq has drained the administration's energy and creativity, and how much it continues to define the Bush presidency. Before even turning to domestic issues, the president restated his determination to stay the course in Iraq, defended his controversial program of warrantless surveillance at home and issued another warning to Iran over its nuclear program.
Beyond Iraq, Bush's agenda is constrained by political and fiscal realities. Deep partisanship in Washington and the prospect of Democratic gains in the midterm elections lessen the likelihood of cooperation between the two parties on any issue of significance. Fiscally, the deep federal deficit and pressure from Republicans to cut spending restrain the president's ability to spend as significantly on domestic initiatives as he might like.
Down in the polls, Bush sought to frame the coming year as a time of potentially decisive choices on national and economic security, and he provided a vigorous defense of his policies at home and abroad, suggesting that his opponents would lead the country toward isolationism and protectionism. "We will choose to act confidently in pursuing the enemies of freedom, or retreat from our duties in the hope of an easier life," he said. "We will choose to build our prosperity by leading the world economy, or shut ourselves off from trade and opportunity."
He also pointed to two of his recent bright spots: the two newest members of the Supreme Court: Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who were visible in the front rows of the House chamber last night. Alito was sworn in earlier in the day after the Senate voted 58 to 42 -- largely along party lines -- to confirm him.
The humbling of Bush came in many forms last year. Slow progress toward stabilization in Iraq, Palestinian elections in which the radical Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, emerged victorious, and a growing threat from an Iran developing nuclear weapons have shown the limits of administration policies. Bush said he has "a clear plan for victory," but he offered no strong signal of an early return of most U.S. forces in Iraq.
Domestically, beyond the failure on Social Security legislation, House Republicans rejected Bush's immigration plan and Hurricane Katrina dealt a blow to the administration's claims to competence in the face of crisis -- while punching an additional hole in the budget. Republicans forced White House counsel Harriet Miers to withdraw her nomination to the high court. The tax-reform debate fizzled, and the administration walked away from the recommendations of the commission Bush had appointed.
Those setbacks forced White House officials to reassess a second-term strategy devised by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove. The chief architect of Bush's reelection, Rove had studied second-term presidencies and determined that Bush should pursue major changes in the first year of the second term, before political pressures eroded his clout. Events proved him wrong.
After Bush's poll numbers plummeted, White House aides started rethinking the fundamental assumptions about second-term possibilities. Bush was forced to scrap his agenda and also curtail his ambitions. The president was advised to focus most of his attention on Iraq, the centerpiece of his presidency, and other foreign policy hot spots.
The political environment has changed, too. Instead of talking about a broad political realignment, White House aides are simply trying to help Republicans keep hold of Congress amid a flurry of scandals that include the indictment of Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), the former House majority leader, and the plea agreement by former GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
The result was a speech last night written with far more attention to the politics of the moment. On energy, Bush called for reduced consumption of oil from the Middle East by 75 percent over the next two decades with the use of new technologies and alternate energy sources. Notably, he never mentioned his earlier goal of opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas development, a small concession to the Democrats who have repeatedly frustrated him on the issue.
His health care proposals aim at expanding coverage and portability of health insurance, relative modest proposals at a time about 45 million Americans lack coverage. But he said nothing about the new Medicare prescription drug program, an initiative Republicans once hoped to trumpet but has angered many seniors in its implementation.
On the economy, Bush made another appeal to Congress to make his tax cuts permanent, an issue that his political advisers see as a key contrast with the Democrats. His competitiveness agenda, which the White House said will cost $136 billion over 10 years, includes proposals to train more science and math teachers and to boost investment in science research. He made little mention of Hurricane Katrina.
Republican strategists said that, although Bush hoped to boost his standing with the public, his other primary audience may have been GOP lawmakers calibrating whether to buy into his agenda or go their own way as they prepare for the fall campaign. Tom Rath, the Republican national committeeman from New Hampshire, said the party's elected officials are not interested in grandly ambitious initiatives this year. "Nobody wants to spend time in an election year to make an ideological statement," he said.
Republican pollster Bill McInturff said elected officials would be calibrating whether the Bush agenda will produce the kind of legislative results they can run on in November. "The president is on softer footing than he was a year ago, and he needs to lay out a legislative agenda that deals with issues of day-to-day concern, like health care costs and gasoline prices, and talk about the issues people care about," he said before the speech.
White House officials described Bush's speech as more philosophical than the typical State of the Union address, but at this point the philosophical outlines of his presidency are well known. What will count in the year ahead are the results his policies produce. Legislative achievements may help, but what will be even more useful for Republican candidates is a president who has regained the public's confidence. That will take more than one speech.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
February 1, 2006
News Analysis
Bold Visions Have Given Way to New Reality
By DAVID E. SANGER
WASHINGTON, Jan. 31 — It was an evening for President Bush to confront America's anxieties — and his own.
Only a year after Mr. Bush stood in the House, describing in bold terms how he planned to spend the political capital he had amassed in the 2004 election, the president who addressed the nation on Tuesday evening was far less ambitious, his tone noticeably different.
The Texan who swept onto the national political scene six years ago talking about drilling for new energy supplies and preserving the American way of life vowed on Tuesday night to wean the nation from its reliance on oil. Instead of urging Congress to drill in the Arctic, the president who had waved off the critics who portrayed him and Vice President Dick Cheney as captives of the oil industry asked Congress to finance federal research into alternative fuels and lithium batteries.
A president who has rarely dwelled on the impact of globalization for American workers was suddenly looking over his shoulder at China and India, and committing the federal government to a quest for 70,000 teachers and 30,000 scientists to prepare American students for a new era of competition.
It was, in short, a speech rooted in some harsh global and political realities, and one unlikely to rank among Mr. Bush's most memorable. Instead of evoking the grand ambitions that have suffused his presidency since the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Bush emphasized the familiar and the modest. At a moment of partisan fervor, he offered an olive branch, reviving a pledge to lower the temperature. "Our differences cannot be allowed to harden into anger," he said.
Yet by any measure, Mr. Bush's options are far more limited than they were a year ago. Much of the momentum he boasted about in the days after his re-election is gone, some of it lost on a bold Social Security initiative that never took off, some washed away by the deeply disorganized federal response to Hurricane Katrina.
The budget deficit, rising again despite Mr. Bush's promise to cut it in half by the time he leaves office in 2009, effectively handcuffs him when it comes to new initiatives. The few new ideas he unveiled were largely thematic, not backed by broad programmatic initiatives.
Three years into the war in Iraq, Mr. Bush tried anew to strike a tone of optimism, saying that "we are in this fight, and we are winning." But he also bowed to the country's anxiety about finding a path out of a mission that seems to become harder each day, and he warned anew of the dangers of premature retreat. "In a time of testing, we cannot find security by abandoning our commitments and retreating within our borders," he said.
Mr. Bush's approval ratings, which soared over 90 percent in the days after the terrorist attacks, bounced around in the 30's last fall and now hover anemically in the low 40's. His party, beset by a lobbying scandal and a breakdown in discipline on Capitol Hill, is nervous about the coming midterm elections.
With three years left in his presidency, Mr. Bush is certainly far from that lame-duck moment he used to joke about on his campaign plane — that point in his second term when he said he would "quack like a duck." On Tuesday alone, he won two major victories, the confirmations of Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. for the Supreme Court and Ben S. Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Both appointments promise to leave Mr. Bush's stamp on Washington long after he has retired to his ranch and begun building his presidential library.
But in acknowledging on Tuesday that Americans face "a complex and challenging time," Mr. Bush was doing more than issuing a call for global engagement. He was also acknowledging that five years into his presidency, the citizens of the world's most powerful nation do not feel that their status has brought them security.
"He needs to reassure us on the economy, and reassure people there is a future they can be positive about," said Michael K. Deaver, the image maker who helped make Ronald Reagan — on whom Mr. Bush has tried to model much of his presidency — a master of optimism. "People have been saying no to that question everyone asks — 'Am I going to be better off a year from now than I am today?' — and that has been going on for the past two or three years."
Mr. Bush's prescriptions Tuesday night were largely familiar: making tax cuts permanent, keeping markets open, keeping health care costs down. What was new was his Advanced Energy Initiative, though the increases he proposed in clean-energy research, better batteries for hybrid cars and new ways of making ethanol largely piggyback on programs already under way at General Motors and Ford, Toyota and Honda, rather than charting a new course.
And his proposals to "encourage children to take more math and science" had echoes of President Bill Clinton, whose incessant talk of remaking the work force to meet the challenges of a global economy were often referred to derisively during Mr. Bush's first term as feel-good economics.
"Second-term presidents often gravitate toward foreign policy," said Doug Sosnik, who drafted many of those policies for Mr. Clinton. "What's happened to this president is that there is more pressure to attend to the domestic needs of the country. And it's hard, because he has less room to operate and less money to spend."
Mr. Bush has more leeway in the area of foreign policy, but even here, limits loom larger than they did a year ago.
Facing public hearings in February on his once-secret program to conduct eavesdropping, without the benefit of warrants, on telephone calls between the United States and abroad, Mr. Bush defended his order anew as "a terrorist surveillance program." He also argued, in an expansive reading of existing case law, that he had acted "based on authority given to me by the Constitution and by statute," an authority that he said the federal courts had approved.
In the face of Iran's defiance of full international inspection of its nuclear program, Mr. Bush declared that "the nations of the world must not permit the Iranian regime to gain nuclear weapons." But in contrast to the confrontational tone that suffused his State of the Union speech of January 2003, which made the case for confronting Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Mr. Bush made no threats about what would happen if Iran continued down its current path.
Instead, he struck a decidedly moderate tone, careful not to outstep the European allies with whom he is trying to repair relations. And he seemed to recognize, said Lee Feinstein of the Council on Foreign Relations, that "clearly Iran has more ways of making our lives difficult in Iraq."
It is worth remembering that Mr. Bush has more time left in his presidency than John F. Kennedy served in his. Three years is a lot of time, and as Mr. Bush proved after Sept. 11, it only takes one day to redirect a presidency. But the path he described Tuesday night aimed more toward the middle lanes he talked about so often in the early days after he arrived in the White House, rather than the shifting of tectonic plates that he tried to engineer in the past four years.
* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company