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WASHINGTON: Cursed by rock-bottom poll ratings,
chided by Congress’s new Democratic masters and bound up in
Iraq’s agony, President George W. Bush offered little to loosen
his political straitjacket in his State of the Union address,
analysts said.
Bush once strode into the House
of Representatives bear pit unchallenged, using the annual speech to
ram home his mastery over cowering political rivals, skewering US
enemies and slotting them into an “axis of evil.”
But the president was on a
precipice, with public support hemorrhaging over the unpopular war
in Iraq, and for the first time in his six White House years, in the
minority in a Congress run by Democrats.
Bush warned Americans of a
“nightmare scenario” that would result from defeat in Iraq,
unveiled a new plan to cut gasoline use by 20 percent in 10 years
and produced a new plea to overhaul immigration laws.
But the president, with only two
years left in his second term, and the 2008 presidential field
sprinting out of the starting blocks, bore little resemblance to the
man who was unchallenged in US politics—as recently as two years
ago.
“The only resource he had left
was his rhetoric,” said Buddy Howell, an expert on presidential
speechmaking at Purdue University.
“He needed to hit a home run
and he did not,” said Howell, using a baseball metaphor to argue
Bush needed a knockout blow to rescue his declining presidency.
Prof. Steven Smith, a specialist
on congressional politics at Washington University, St. Louis, said
Bush’s delivery mirrored his perilous position.
“This was an extremely low-key
speech; there was a bit of a drone to his speech at times, which I
think reflected not defeatism, but a sense of realism,” Smith
said.
“This was a president who has
viewed his role as being a cheerleader over the years, this speech
had none of that.”
Perched behind Bush’s left
shoulder, at the podium, was Democrat Nancy Pelosi, in a pale-green
suit, cheered to the rafters when Bush uttered words never before
heard at the State of the Union speech: “Madam Speaker.”
Since Bush’s hope for any
legislative triumphs now rests on accommodation with Democrats, Bush
set the tone by warmly praising Pelosi, in perhaps the most
effective moments of his speech.
“Given what he was facing he
did an impressive job,” said Dr. Darryl Clark, an expert on
presidential rhetoric at the University of Indianapolis.
In a reminder of Bush’s lame
duck status, television cameras often lingered on Democrats and
Republicans plotting to grab the keys to the White House.
Sen. Hillary Clinton, who
electrified the US political scene Saturday by announcing her
historic White House run, looked on from the back of the chamber.
One row in front, sat Sen. Barack
Obama, the rising star first-term Democratic senator challenging her
early dominance.
Sen. John McCain, a Republican
frontrunner, was also prominent in the audience, as the 2008 race
that will further curtail Bush’s power loomed.
“There is no doubt that [Bush]
is especially lame even for a lame duck this early in his last two
years,” Clark said. “He is really in a very, very weak
position.”
Bush, grayer and more drawn than
the energetic figure who burst into the House for his first State of
the Union speech in 2001, delivered his speech in measured
tones—punctuated by less effusive ovations than in years gone by.
His rhetoric was devoid of the
simply constructed, yet powerful flights of rhetoric of previous
speeches, that steadied Americans in the dark days after the
September 11 attacks in 2001.
Perhaps reflecting the political
cul-de-sac of the Iraq war, Bush was reduced to pleading for more
time for his latest plan to pacify the nation, from a podium where
he once vowed to disarm Saddam Hussein.
As it was, Bush warned the
Congress, containing many members who want to start the redeployment
of US troops that defeat in Iraq would unleash a “contagion of
violence” across the Middle East.
“For America, this is a
nightmare scenario,” he said.
Bush’s environmental proposals,
though eyebrow raising in a nation addicted to its gas guzzling
cars—a plan to cut gasoline use by 20 percent—in 10 years.
But critics saw little dramatic
in the changes, and nothing to unduly concern the mighty Detroit
auto industry.
--AFP
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