George W. Bush began his State of the Union speech Tuesday night looking like a confident president who relishes how popular he is among Americans. By the time he finished speaking, though, he hadn’t adequately addressed the most dangerous blind spot of his presidency. That failure creates a vulnerability Bush can’t afford in an election year as voters evaluate the otherwise good job he’s done.
No, that last phrase isn’t just a newspaper praising a politician whose candidacy it endorsed. That is, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll published Tuesday, how most Americans view their president. His approval rating stands at 58 percent, roughly where it has been since July–remarkably high for any president at this point in his first term. The reasons for Bush’s sustained popularity are a mystery only to his most bilious foes. The Post’s polling report put it succinctly: “Bush continues to enjoy a huge advantage over Democrats on matters of national security, besting them by 2 to 1 in the fight against terrorism and by nearly as broad a margin on his handling of the conflict in Iraq.”
On Tuesday night Bush claimed, correctly, that “Because of American leadership and resolve, the world is changing for the better.” Thanks in large part to his willingness to remove Saddam Hussein, thuggish regimes in Libya, North Korea and Iran appear to be getting the message that with this president, dangerous behavior and illicit nuclear ambitions can have unpleasant consequences.
Bush cannot claim, though, that his tolerance for ever-higher federal spending has made this nation more secure economically as well. His failure to be the fiscal steward he campaigned as in 2000 now leaves him open to attack.
As he listed new spending proposals Tuesday night–for training workers, for drug testing, for sexual abstinence programs, for assistance to convicts leaving prison, for incentives to encourage medical coverage of the uninsured–Bush’s political calculus came all the clearer. We can spend money just as well as Democrats do to get re-elected, he seemed to be saying. We’re appeasing Republican voters with tax cuts that we want to make permanent–and we’re appeasing Democratic voters with costly new programs.
Yet Bush’s political calculus saddles the nation with two problems. First, the cost of his tax cuts will grow exponentially over time, putting more pressure on the federal treasury and on tomorrow’s taxpayers. Second, Bush hasn’t cut the spending that he needs to curb dramatically in order to justify making his tax cuts permanent.
The president asserted that by better managing taxpayers’ money, “we can cut the deficit in half over the next five years.” But he offered no specifics, and the record of this president and this Congress doesn’t inspire faith. One example among many: With Medicare and Social Security facing immense demands as Baby Boomers age, what stunt did the mutual spending enablers in Washington recently execute? They joined forces to schmooze voters with a gargantuan Medicare drug benefit that is priced, over one decade alone, in the hundreds of billions.
The Democratic candidates for the presidency offer more of the same. Each has proposed complete or partial repeals of Bush’s tax cuts. But according to calculations by the National Taxpayers Union Foundation, their respective proposals for new spending would, in each case, cost more than their proposed tax increases would yield. Translation: Give the challengers their way and deficits will . . . grow even bigger.
America needs a leader who will challenge this culture of profligacy. Bush had every right to boast Tuesday night about his efforts to protect this nation from its enemies abroad. What’s unfortunate is that his address didn’t demand similarly bold restraints on federal spending to assure this nation’s economic security as well.
