January 22, 2004, 8:47 a.m.
Ready for Battle
A campaign-year SOTU.

By NR Editors

EDITOR'S NOTE: This editorial appears in the February 9, 2004, issue of National Review.

President Bush's State of the Union address gave the impression of a man eager to go out on the hustings and refute his critics — indeed, frustrated that he has not been able to do so. It was a campaign speech. One by one, he picked apart the Democrats' arguments. The war on terror is a war, he insists, not a legal action: "After the chaos and carnage of September 11th, it is not enough to serve our enemies with legal papers. The terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States — and war is what they got." The administration had built a broad international coalition for its action in Iraq, and critics were wrong to "dismiss their sacrifices." Action in Iraq had led directly to progress in Libya: "Nine months of intense negotiations involving the United States and Great Britain succeeded with Libya, while twelve years of diplomacy with Iraq did not. And one reason is clear: For diplomacy to be effective, words must be credible — and no one can now doubt the word of America."

The president was similarly combative on education. He defended his No Child Left Behind Act. We did not like that bill, ourselves, but Bush's critique of the left-wing complaints about it were dead-on. It is not too much to ask that the schools produce third-graders who can read at third-grade levels, and testing is the way to make sure that they do so. "This nation will not go back to the days of simply shuffling children along from grade to grade without them learning the basics." (But shouldn't that "them" have been a "their"?)

There was something in the speech for most conservatives. Law-and-order conservatives learned that the president is prepared to defend the Patriot Act during the campaign. Free-market conservatives got a renewed call for making the tax cuts permanent, beefed-up health savings accounts, tort reform, and — above all — continued support for personal accounts in Social Security. Social conservatives got increased funding for abstinence education, drug testing in the schools, rhetoric against steroid abuse by athletes, and, perhaps most important, some presidential support for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. The president's remarks on this last point were somewhat vague; he did not actually call for an amendment. But he framed the issue the right way. Judges, he said, were rewriting the marriage laws and had to be stopped. A constitutional amendment might be the only way to stop them. At the same time, he made it clear that he has no intention of promoting hostility to homosexuals.

The major programmatic fault of the speech is also that of his presidency: There was too much spending. Some of Bush's spending we support — the doubling of funding for the National Endowment for Democracy. Other spending we are more skeptical about: Why should the federal government be involved in promoting condoms or abstinence? We doubt very much that new subsidies to community colleges will turn out to be money well spent. But all the new spending, good and bad, needs to be offset by spending reductions elsewhere. The president came out for no specific spending cuts. He asked only that Congress show some spending restraint and cut the deficit in half over five years — a truly lame battle cry.

We were heartened to see that congressmen kept their seats when the president discussed his immigration reforms (about which more below). But especially after watching the Democratic response by Nancy Pelosi and Tom Daschle — who more or less presented the war as a distraction from the urgent business of creating new subsidies for their constituents — we are happy to give Bush two cheers, and look forward to his giving the State of the Union address again next year.

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