Whether you loathe him or love him, on Tuesday night you saw a humbled president stand before his nation. For him personally, the State of the Union is largely … unrewarding.
George W. Bush is now years removed from the two key victories of his domestic agenda. One is the No Child Left Behind law that introduced a powerful culture of accountability to public education. The other is the succession of tax cuts that provoked the American economy into a flush era of job creation, market growth and rising government revenues.
What keeps those two aging wins from defining Bush’s presidency is an unpopular war overseas and its political effect at home: the thumpin’ his fellow Republicans took in the November election.
Sea-changing elections like that of 2006 can play out in startling ways. It’s unlikely Bill Clinton awoke the morning after the Republican landslide of 1994 with the notion that the newly empowered opposition party would hand him two signature achievements, welfare reform and a balanced budget. On those two fronts, Clinton did some reaching out and some compromising. In return he got to sign the legislation from Republicans on Capitol Hill that gave him the legacy of a president who gets things done.
Bush seemed to be reaching out Tuesday night, even flirting with compromise. “Our citizens don’t much care which side of the aisle we sit on,” he said in the early moments of his address, “as long as we are willing to cross that aisle when there is work to be done.” The president may already realize what Democratic leaders in Congress also may come to understand: They need each other more, not less, than they would if they were all of one political persuasion. Members of Congress pass bills. Those bills evolve into paperweights if a president won’t sign them into law.
It’s treacherous to guess which of the many realms of public policy Bush mentioned Tuesday night has the potential to give him, and congressional Democrats, a lasting legacy of bipartisan achievement.
Will it be the creative extension of health insurance coverage to millions of Americans who lurch through life without it today? Will it be some balance of energy exploration and environmental protection that makes this country less reliant on the crucible of angry Middle Eastern nations for the petroleum that fuels our factories and cars? Will it be some masterful macroagreement that will quiet this country’s intramural fury over illegal immigration?
Tuesday night’s speechifying–during Bush’s State of the Union address and afterward, as Democrats hotly critiqued his assessment of the nation’s policy landscape and handling of war in Iraq–sounded to us like a balky first date.
Bush, now stripped of his Republican Congress, essentially asked in accommodating tones to be part of the nation’s domestic lawmaking agenda and to be given time in Iraq.
The Democrats responded: Don’t count on it.
