Life Support

Two interesting recaps of the State of the Union speech.

In The State of the Union, from top to bottom, Dick Polman sets the stage:

President Bush’s political predicament was best illustrated by the tableau behind him. As he got ready to deliver his subdued State of the Union address, he was flanked, over his right shoulder, by Dick Cheney, perhaps the only elected leader at the moment who is more unpopular than Bush is; not to mention the fact that Cheney had his name bandied about all day during the Scooter Libby perjury trial. And Bush was flanked, over his left shoulder, by Nancy Pelosi, whose rise to the House speakership can be directly attributed to Bush’s ruinous war of choice in Iraq.

With Salon's piece by Walter Shapiro, Two long years to go, the subtitle says it all: Despite his prattle about cutting the deficit, a grudging nod to global climate change, and yet another plea for backup on his Iraq plan, Bush's presidency entered its final phase on life support.

Providing a good point-by-point analysis of the speech (especially, if like me, you couldn't bear to watch), Polman's summation of the speech is damning:

Most State of the Union speeches (a purely 20th-century contrivance, mandated nowhere in the Constitution) are pretty worthless, no matter which party occupies the White House, and this one was no exception. Every president pledges to work in a bipartisan manner, and it’s only a matter of time before the pledge is breached. Bush managed to do this – perhaps inadvertently – within the first 30 seconds. He talked up the “wisdom of working together,” and then (according to the written transcript) he proceeded to “congratulate the Democratic majority.” The problem was that when he spoke the sentence, he extended congrats to “the Democrat majority” – the standard GOP pejorative that ticks off Democratic lawmakers every time.

For its part, the Salon article aptly observes:

Imagine if the Constitution required George W. Bush to report to Congress annually on the state of the presidency, rather than the nation. There could be only one word to describe Bush's current condition: "dire," the same adjective that Lt. Gen. David Petraeus employed Tuesday morning to characterize the military situation in Iraq.

Ever since Woodrow Wilson created the modern tradition of oral State of the Union addresses, by appearing before Congress in 1913, few presidents (maybe only Herbert Hoover in 1932 and Richard Nixon in 1974) have embarked on this rhetorical task with such dismal prospects for political salvation. It would take both victory in Iraq and a free Prius for every family to rescue a president whose approval ratings -- 28 percent in the latest CBS News poll -- have sunk lower than the number of voters who want to send more troops to Iraq (29 percent in the same survey).

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What we are witnessing is the downside of the stability built into the American political system -- the inability of a four-year presidential administration to fall of its own weight. If this were a parliamentary system, all it would take would be a no-confidence vote in Congress to bring on a new presidential election. And probably even a significant minority of Republicans would support such a heave-ho motion. But instead -- keeping in mind that incompetence is not an impeachable offense -- we are saddled with Bush and Dick Cheney for another two years. Which raises the grave issue of whether a president -- armed with his formidable constitutional powers -- can function without the support of Congress, two-thirds of the voters and a growing number of senior members (Virginia Sen. John Warner is a prime example) of his own party.

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But there is nothing normal about a second-term president whose popularity is slipping dangerously close to Barry Bonds levels. Bush is more than a lame duck; he is akin to an aquatic bird carried around on a stretcher. Maybe the most memorable aspect of the 2007 State of the Union address is simply that Bush survived it.

I knew I was better off with this or this.

Tags: Bush, Commentary, Politics, SOTU