The State of the Union: Pretty Much As Predicted

As I had predicted, President Bush played it safe with his State of the Union speech last night, calling for what he thinks he has a chance of getting, not what he really wants.

The New York Times puts it all in perspective in a news analysis:

It is worth remembering that Mr. Bush has more time left in his presidency than John F. Kennedy served in his. Three years is a lot of time, and as Mr. Bush proved after Sept. 11, it only takes one day to redirect a presidency. But the path he described Tuesday night aimed more toward the middle lanes he talked about so often in the early days after he arrived in the White House, rather than the shifting of tectonic plates that he tried to engineer in the past four years.

There were two surprises:

* The president's tone was welcomingly conciliatory, although whether that plays out in coming months is another matter. It's just so damned difficult to imagine his henchmen, chief among them Cheney and Rove, making nice.

* The president announced what he called an Advanced Energy Initiative, which would increase spending for clean energy research, develop better batteries for hybrid cars and find new and more efficient ways of making ethanol.

While it was encouraging to see the president remove his head from his backside and belatedly acknowledge that the U.S. cannot continue to rely on unstable foreign oil sources, the devil is in the details and there is less to the initiative than meets the eye.

Why?

Because private industry, notably automobile manufacturers, are already hard at work on improving hybrid and ethanol technology, and money just isn't available for the kind of "Putting Man on the Moon" funding that is needed to light a big fire under clean energy research. Face it, the cupboard is bare because of the administration's spending binge over the last five years and, lest anyone need reminding, that big sucking sound called the war in Iraq.

I'm left with the distinct feeling that the president, whose campaigns have been bankrolled by Big Oil for years, cares a lot less about true American energy independence than scoring a few points on a hugely important issue on which his administration will make but a miniscule investment in its waning years.

Washington Post business columnist Steve Pearlstein was brutally accurate in his assessment:

We've known for the past several years that the Democrats have nothing original, credible or even mildly intellectually intriguing to say about trade and immigration, the health care crisis, the energy crisis, the income inequality crisis, the education crisis, the global warming crisis, the looming entitlement crisis and the ballooning federal budget deficit.

But now it's official: the Republicans have nothing original, credible or even mildly intellectually intriguing to say about them, either.

It's unanimous.

Listening to the president's speech, in fact, was a bit like stepping into a time machine.

The we-can-meet-this-challenge rhetoric about energy independence, cars running on alternative energy and ending our addiction to Mideast Oil -- that could have come straight from the mouth of Jimmy Carter. The only thing missing was the sweater.