• State of the Union: The biggest dreams
State of the Union: The biggest dreams
History the corner may look back on President George W. Bush’s first State of the Union speech of his second term as the moment when a bold president turned in Iraq and worked a political miracle by transforming Social Security into part of his ownership society.
Then again, history may look back on this speech as the moment when a brash president overreached by exaggerating his ability to spread freedom around the world, and by attacking the most revered creation of the New Deal.
There are reasons not to bet against Mr. Bush. During his first term he passed a big tax cut, a major education reform and a huge expansion of Medicare. But history has more examples of presidents failing greatly than achieving greatly.
Mr. Bush exuded confidence and managed to make a very conservative agenda including the elimination of 150 programs sound positively mainstream.
He began by pointing to the recent elections in Afghanistan, Ukraine, the Palestinian territories and Iraq. He said that the Iraqi election showed that democracy would succeed there and inspire democrats from Damascus to Tehran.
There was a deeply touching moment in the gallery when an Iraqi woman voter, Safia Taleb alSuhail, whose father had been killed by Saddam Hussein’s secret police, embraced Janet Norwood, the mother of a dead Marine, Sgt. Byron Norwood.
But the future of democracy in Iraq, much less Syria and Iran, is far from assured. Indeed, Mr. Bush’s threats directed toward Iran could backfire in light of the broad support among all Iranians for that country’s nuclear program.
Just how tough a sell the Social Security plan will be was illustrated by the murmured “nos” among Democrats when Mr. Bush said that the system would be “exhausted and bankrupt” by 2042.
But Mr. Bush did a good selling job. For starters, he told those 55 and older that they would get their Social Security as promised a strategy to disarm the opposition of baby boomers.
Then Mr. Bush told younger Americans, less wedded to Social Security, that they would have a chance to invest up to twothirds of their Social Security contribution in personal retirement accounts.
Mr. Bush called for “courage and honesty” in the debate. But the president was a little misleading himself. He didn’t mention that the government is obligated to pay back the system the money it has borrowed. He didn’t mention that allowing young people to invest twothirds of their money in private accounts will deepen the system’s financial problems, not solve them. And there was no hint of how he would pay for $2 trillion in transformation costs.
Mr. Bush closed by saying that America is where the “biggest dreams are born.” The size of his secondterm dreams and the confidence with which he is pursuing them, proves the point.
