News n Notes from the Web

Keeping pesky facts out of it
By Dick Polman - Inquirer Political Analyst 1 Feb 2006

For any president, the State of the Union address is a dream event. He can put the sunniest spin on the national condition, with nary a nod to any inconvenient facts. He can announce grand goals that sound new, even when they are old. He can extend the olive branch to the opposition party, even while twisting the knife.

President Bush utilized all the perks of his office last night, in his bid to reconnect with an increasingly skeptical electorate and reassure Republicans gathered in the House chamber that he still has the requisite moxie to protect their careers in the November elections.

Accordingly, Bush said that the state of our union is strong (will any president ever emulate Gerald Ford, who in 1975 said, "The state of the union is not good"?); that he wants to cure our health-care and oil-dependence problems (virtually replicating the phrases he used in previous addresses); and that he wants to work with Democrats "in a spirit of goodwill and respect" (while suggesting, in six separate references, that his opponents want to "retreat" from fighting terrorists).

Awash in approbation, a president always looks imposing on such a night; Bill Clinton, in the teeth of a sex scandal, rocked the room in 1998. And last night, one would not have guessed that Bush is posting the lowest popularity numbers since Richard Nixon - 39 percent support, in the new bipartisan survey conducted by Republican pollster Bill McInturff and Democratic pollster Peter Hart. As conservative analyst Tod Lindberg quipped yesterday, Bush in recent months "has fought his way back - from a catastrophic collapse of job approval all the way up to historic lows of job approval."

But the familiar Bush formula is to cede no ground, regardless of the facts that might undercut his arguments. Consider last night's speech:

Bush defended his warrantless-surveillance program, contending that "appropriate members of Congress have been kept informed." But a legal analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service has faulted Bush for not seeking to inform the full membership of the House and Senate intelligence committees - thereby acting in a manner "inconsistent with the law."

Bush said that the same kind of program might have prevented 9/11; as he put it: "We now know that two of the hijackers in the United States placed telephone calls to al-Qaeda operatives overseas... . We did not know about their plans until it was too late." But the bipartisan 9/11 commission concluded in its report that intelligence officials had amassed plenty of information on those future hijackers, and had failed to act only because of turf wars and bureaucratic inertia.

Bush said, "Our country must also remain on the offensive against terrorism here at home." But former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, a Republican who chaired the 9/11 commission, said last autumn on NBC that homeland security was "not a priority for the government right now... . A lot of the things we need to do really to prevent another 9/11 just simply aren't being done by the President or by the Congress... ."

On the domestic front, Bush said that his tax cuts should be made permanent, to ensure the nation's economic health. But the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has concluded that if those cuts aren't allowed to expire on schedule, we will have massive budget deficits for the next 10 years.

Bush lauded his reconstruction program for New Orleans ("a hopeful society comes to the aid of fellow citizens") but didn't mention that the White House response to Katrina was facing multiple probes. A House Republican investigator has already cited "a disturbing inability by the White House to de-conflict and analyze information - and that had consequences." Meanwhile, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office today is releasing a report that faults Bush's team for a failed leadership, one which "serves to underscore the immaturity of and weaknesses relating to the current national response framework."

Bush lauded his efforts to provide health care for the elderly ("we are meeting that responsibility"). But he avoided any reference to the new Medicare drug-prescription plan, which is being assailed even by Republicans (Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota: "The implementation of the new program by the federal government has been awful"), and by other critics who don't like the fact that feds are barred by law from negotiating with the drug companies for lower prices.

Essentially, Bush's references to health care had a deja vu quality. At one point, he said: "For all Americans, we must confront the rising cost of care... and help people afford the insurance coverage they need." But here's what he said in 2004: "Members of Congress, we must work together to help control those costs and extend the benefits of modern medicine throughout the country." (Clinton and the senior George Bush also had soaring State of the Union oratory about reforming health care, but their rhetoric didn't work, either.)

In terms of power politics, none of these caveats about the Bush speech necessarily matter. If Republicans in the chamber (and the Bush fans watching on TV) take heart from what was essentially a pep talk, there is little that the outmaneuvered Democrats can do - except try to put Bush on the defensive between now and November. They have been only sporadically successful over the last five years. And they are well aware that Bush still has more days left in office than John F. Kennedy's entire tenure. As Lindberg, the conservative commentator, said yesterday: "He has three more years to drive them crazy."