Quotes of the Day

In 1992, a president named George Bush went before the country to deliver the State of the Union. His polls were falling; he was facing a conservative insurgency in New Hampshire; victory against Iraq was a fading memory. This was his chance to turn it around. The speech, though, was a mess — a hodgepodge of self-congratulatory lines and predictable tax cuts. ("My plan would modify the passive-loss rule for active real-estate developers," he droned.) His bells and whistles were sleepers. No one mistook him for FDR or Reagan when he called on then-Missouri Governor John Ashcroft to chair a commission on American Cities. It was the beginning of the end.

The son has, of course, studied the father. And so George W. Bush's speech was a methodical battening down of the hatches. Conservative bone (gay marriage, faith-based education, bashing trial lawyers); appeal to swings (immigration reform, prescription drugs); protecting the country (we got Saddam, we won't grovel to the UN, the world really is with us.) Surrounded by the graying, pasty visages of Dick Cheney and Denny Hastert, Bush looked vigorous. His red tie, blue suit and white shirt echoed the flag behind him. It's the best set a president can get and Bush knows how to use it. You can hardly believe presidents from Jefferson to Taft just sent written State of the Union messages to Congress instead of delivering them. The speech was actually given at noon instead of at night until 1965 when LBJ put it in prime time.

Bush's chief speechwriter, Mike Gerson, has the best skill a speechwriter can have: he knows his subject's voice. Bush's prose doesn't aim for the sky, but it has a kind of authenticity that works. When he says "no one can now doubt the word of America" it's got the ring of truth for good or ill. But the speech wasn't without its weak moments. Bush's sly phrase, "exports are rising," couldn't mask what everyone knows: Imports are rising a lot faster and America's trade deficit is killing American manufacturing. His call for fiscal discipline from Congress felt laughable, given the record 8% growth in spending he's presided over. And what was that steroid riff about? It must have tested well in Bush Pollster Matthew Dowd's surveys but it felt weak. Bush didn't offer any initiative to crack down on deadly muscle merchants. All he did was call on coaches to take a whack at them. Also: Why wait a half hour before going into domestic issues? I suspect a lot of people reached for the remote. The quoting of weapons inspector David Kay's report showed how far the administration has had to back down on its more grandiose claims of Iraqis weapons programs.

Democrats could have found a lot in the speech to chide: no real plan to control health care costs, just expensive tax breaks to help people shell out more dough to pharmaceutical companies and HMOs. There's still no plan to define success in Iraq and even though Bush rattled off a list of countries that are ostensibly helping us with Iraq — Norway! El Salvador! — no one really has any doubt that this is an American war.

Bush also laid out a trident of sharp points with which to attack the leading Democratic candidates. The chiding of trial lawyers presages what Bush would try to do to Sen. John Edwards, the King of Torts turned freshman senator. The line about not needing "permission slips" to defend America would get used against John Kerry, who keeps talking like he had a plan to get the French to support us in Iraq. (Yeah, right.) And the defense of the two-year-old No Child Left Behind bill seemed like it was aimed at a still front-running Howard Dean, who has chided the bill at every turn.

In the Democratic response, Nancy Pelosi and Tom Daschle did the candidates no favor. Looking like an estranged couple at marriage counseling, their stilted lines lacked Bush's vigor. Ted Kennedy's jowly grimace and Hillary Clinton contemptuous smiles and grimacing didn't help matters. And was Charlie Rangel asleep or just reading?

Bush isn't a great communicator, but he is a slick one. He was wise enough to skip the whole mission-to-Mars proposal and adroit enough to talk through the whole marriage thing without using the word gay but invoking Bill Clinton by name. All said, Bush has what every president needs: a narrative that explains his tenure. His is a morality play. The economy? All those tax cuts were CPR. (Actually they were more like the quick-fix steroids Bush denounces.) Americans may yet fire Bush but they're likely to do so reluctantly after all they've been through with him. Democrats need a narrative to explain why Bush is faltering and how they'd do better. They're not there yet. But they may be by November.

• Matthew Cooper
• In his State of the Union speech the President gets ready for the election and plays to his base