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The Week - President Bush's State of the Union speech - this and other events are discussed
National Review, Feb 25, 2002
-- The American Bar Association has criticized the use of military tribunals to try al-Qaeda terrorists. It wants them reserved for Republican judicial nominees.
-- A word, in the wake of the State of the Union address, on modern rhetoric. All Americans like rhetoric [Applause]. Rhetoric expresses our highest values, and our deepest dreams [Applause]. But there cannot be true rhetoric in one- and two-sentence bursts. Speeches on that pattern read like a bag of fortune cookies [Laughter and applause]. American speakers need to stretch themselves, and American audiences need to listen [Applause] . . . need to listen, or the American spirit cannot stretch its wings [Standing ovation]. Thank you, and God bless America [Applause].
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-- Bush's address was, however, a fine speech, and as Daniel Henninger remarked in the Wall Street Journal, it is impossible to imagine any top Democrat giving it. Indeed, in the days after the speech, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright was on the airwaves saying it was a "big mistake" for Bush to call Iran, Iraq, and North Korea an "axis of evil." It was a mistake, apparently, because it gave the Europeans heartburn -- or at least gave the previous administration's foreign- policy team heartburn. Albright, let's not forget, was the official who decided to replace the phrase "rogue states" with the more anodyne "states of concern" -- as though North Korea were some misunderstood teenager. Albright's other notable contribution to the foreign-policy debate since September 11 has been to criticize the first Bush administration for not toppling Saddam Hussein. Never mind that she opposed the Gulf War at the time, served in an administration that left every aspect of U.S. policy toward Iraq weaker than it had found it, and -- she has recently informed us -- opposes toppling Saddam now. Albright and her colleagues have earned their place in the axis of incompetence.
-- The Democrats seem suddenly to have been propelled back in time to the 1980s. Once again, there's a popular Republican president, and the GOP has a lead in both economic and national-security issues. So Democrats are borrowing from their '80s playbook: issuing dire warnings about the deficit, capitalizing on such soft maternal issues as health care and the environment, and bleating about "the sleaze factor" -- which has now supposedly been reborn in the Enron scandal. It didn't work back then. Meanwhile, the party's presidential candidates are trying to move rightward to appeal to a newly sober-minded public, while also competing for the liberal voters who will turn out in their primaries. It's only a matter of time before these candidates are compared to the "seven dwarfs" who ran for the Democratic nomination in 1988. Republicans, being Republicans, will probably not have the wit to make the most of their political opportunities. But they should at least enjoy this moment while it lasts.
-- And just when you thought it couldn't get worse for the Democrats, along comes more bad news: Al Gore is returning to public life.
-- "Contempt for the poor" -- that's what New York Times columnist Bob Herbert accused the Bush administration of, in the wake of its decision to alter terms of the State Children's Health Insurance Program. Is the administration cutting back on the program, which subsidizes medical care for low-income kids? To the contrary, Bush is expanding it, changing its definition of the word "children" to include the unborn children of the poor. This move was, naturally, attacked as a backdoor assault on Roe v. Wade. "Cynical!" fretted the Washington Post, lecturing the administration that "politics and pregnancy don't mix." We look forward to the Post's advancing that line in defense of the next Supreme Court nominee who comes under Democratic attack for his pro-life views. And we anticipate with pleasure the campaign-season spectacle of pro-choice Democrats explaining to poor women -- many of whom are "minorities" -- why Bush's decision to pay for their babies' prenatal care is a contemptible thing.
-- Sen. Phil Gramm is being roundly pilloried for doing favors for Enron. Public Citizen, a Naderite group, reported that the Texas Republican pushed through legislation that exempted from regulation a kind of futures trading in which Enron specialized. Several newspapers jumped on the story, with repeat offender Bob Herbert writing a column about how Gramm "danced to Enron's tune." An embarrassing revelation for the senator, one would think. Except that it turns out that Gramm did not write the legislation: It came to the Senate from the House. He didn't usher it through the Senate: He wasn't on the agriculture committee, which considered it. (Some of Gramm's critics appear to have mistakenly assumed that it went through the banking committee, which he chairs.) And while Gramm eventually voted for the bill that included the provision, for several months he single-handedly blocked that bill over Enron's objection. (He objected to other provisions.) So all the embarrassment is on the side of the Public Citizens and Bob Herberts of the world -- if they're capable of it.
