State of the Union speech.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
State of the Union speech.
37
Tue, 01-20-2004 - 8:48am
Presidential Seal   What are the most important points you want addressed?

 

Health care for the uninsured? Jobs for the American workforce? Illegal Immigration? Iraq? Homeland Security? SS reform? Ethical business reform?..........................

 

Address opens Bush campaign.

 



In his State of the Union speech to Congress on Tuesday evening, President Bush will in effect launch his campaign to be re-elected.

 

He will speak in the aftermath of the Iowa caucus vote which gave Massachusetts Senator John Kerry an unexpected victory, but he will be looking beyond immediate events.

He will try to present the strengths of his administration but he will also have to address its weaknesses.

Mr Bush does not yet know which Democrat he will face. Iowa is only the start of the campaign. So he has to adopt a broad strategy.

His strengths lie in foreign fields - in the "war on terror" which he himself declared and in the assertion of the "Bush doctrine" of pre-emptive intervention.

One of his major themes this year will be that America is safer with him at the helm.

New focus

But the tone in this speech may be moderated. He is mindful that he may need to sound more flexible in how his policy is applied.

Take Iraq. It has not gone as well as he had hoped so he might emphasise the chance that Iraq now has to develop democracy rather than dwell on the removal of a doubtful threat from weapons of mass destruction.

According to The New York Times, he will single out Libya as an example of how pressure on a rogue state can force it to change course without war.

Libya has agreed to give up work on nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and to allow full inspections.

By emphasising that Libya has been brought to negotiation not to war, Mr Bush will reach out to those Americans (and his critics around the world) who worry that his policies are too aggressive.

The phrase "axis of evil" first used in this speech two years ago (but dropped last year) is not expected to make a come-back.

Foreign policy, however, is the lesser of his worries.

Domestic vulnerability


A poll published by the Washington Post and ABC News has revealed that it is domestic policy which is his weakness, even though overall support for him is put at 58%.

He is ahead of the Democrats by 2 to1 over policies connected to national security, but he is running statistically even with them on other issues.


He has tried to remedy this in recent weeks and months, promoting, for example, policies to give prescription drugs for the elderly and legalising the presence of illegal immigrants.

The immigration initiative appeals to the Latino vote while not upsetting Middle America too much. The country has always coped with and has indeed been built on waves of immigrants who provide much needed labour.

So the speech will have to dwell in substantial part on the economic and social state of the union.

The rapid growth of the US economy (and the role in this he will claim for his tax cuts) will no doubt feature strongly.

But always at Mr Bush's back is the memory of what happened to his father.

He, too, won a war against Iraq but lost office after neglecting the economy.


Bush's State of Union to Highlight Agenda.

 

cl-Libraone





 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Wed, 01-21-2004 - 2:30pm
As ths UN has proved....unless you are willing to back up the words and resolutions with force, then they are useless.
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-31-2003
Wed, 01-21-2004 - 5:25pm
Yeah, that's why she said "not JUST a missile." That's also why Congress approved the use of force - to give the President a strong diplomatic position to work from. Trouble is the President got the okay and just skipped right over the diplomacy part. Oops.
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Thu, 01-22-2004 - 10:24am
I guess you forgot the 12 prior years of attempted diplomacy, and every time it looked as though the UN was going to come down hard on him, Hussein would feign cooperation.

The problem during Clinton's administration was that the US was already involved in Kosovo, and too many people felt that was a "Wag the Dog" scenario. Could you imagine what the press would have said if Clinton decided to deal with Iraq? Even when he launched a few cruise missiles into the country, they (and the Republicans) were all over him saying he was trying to divert the focus away from the Lewinsky scandal.

The problem with politics is that no matter what one party does, either good or bad, the other party will find fault with it.

Politics no longer works the way it was originally intended to do, as too many corrupt people (a.k.a. politicians) are too power hungry in this country now.

Avatar for moon627
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Thu, 01-22-2004 - 2:16pm
When he said "The U.S. doesn't need a permission slip to protect/defend itself." That was just grandstanding. No other countries opposed us going into Afghanistan and as we all now know, we were not defending ourselves by going after Saddam - because there were no ties to al queda and no weapons of mass destruction. IMHO baby bush was just avenging the bigger baby daddy bush
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-31-2003
Thu, 01-22-2004 - 2:38pm
No, I just forgot to remind you not to think of the word "diplomacy" so narrowly.
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Sat, 01-24-2004 - 10:19am
Apparently you have not been listening to the news that have now proven the ties to al Qaeda. Many of the top people from al Qaeda were in Bagdad and were trained in Iraq, and were allowed to recruit there according to recent news reports, and documents found in Iraq.

I dont think there was a direct tie to 9/11 but we will probably never know this for certain either way.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Sat, 01-24-2004 - 10:19am
I guess 12 years is not enough time for diplomacy to work...

That argument is pretty weak.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-31-2003
Sat, 01-24-2004 - 12:02pm
Sorry, I wasn't very clear. By "narrow" I meant that many people now hear the word "diplomacy" (which has somehow become a dirty word) and automatically think it means trying to plead with Saddam Hussein. That's a very narrow view of diplomacy. A president more skilled in diplomacy would have been able to put together a stonger coalition, which included Arab states (the Gulf War I coalition included about 8 Arab nations including Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria - the "Coalition of the Willing" could only included Kuwait and Afghanistan. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/03/20030325-9.html) I'm not asking for the US to get a "permission slip" as the President so undiplomatically put it. I'm asking him to do his job at least half as well as his father did.

From "United States Puts a Spin on Coalition Numbers"

"The first Persian Gulf War was prosecuted by a 34-nation military force, with each nation listed in the coalition contributing troops on the ground, aircraft, ships or medics. (The list is sometimes reported as 31, because four Persian Gulf states provided a combined force.) Dozens of other nations voiced support for the war against Iraq in 1991, meaning that under the standards used by the current Bush administration, the size of the 1991 coalition likely topped 100 countries."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1325-2003Mar20?language=printer

Besides the credibility that buys you (is credibility a dirty word now too?) it also helps you foot the bill. The War on Terror is incredibly expensive, and asymetrically so. Al Qaeda spent a few hundred thousand on their sleeper cells, and we've spent over $100 billion in response. How long can we keep that up? All they need to do is start up their "chatter" and NYC spends an extra million dollars.

In Gulf I, nations put their money where their mouth was.

From CNN "The Unfinished War: A Decade Since Desert Storm"

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/gulf.war/facts/gulfwar/index.html

"The U.S. Department of Defense has estimated the cost of the Gulf War at $61 billion; however, other sources say that number could be as high as $71 billion. The operation was financed by more than $53 billion pledged by countries around the world, most of which came from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States ($36 billion) and Germany and Japan ($16 billion). Some of the money pledged by countries such as Saudi Arabia was delivered in the form of in-kind services to troops, such as transportation and food."

With all those resources brought together, it would have made it at least a slim possibility that Saddam Hussein would have stepped down. But he saw that the US did not have the support of the world, and he thought he could somehow survive. And in the likelyhood that didn't happen (which was pretty likely), at least we would be sending our troops in with all the support possible, and we wouldn't have wasted precious time bumbling around afterwards trying to get nations we snubbed and ridiculed to give us money. And let's not even bring up the fiasco with Turkey. That was ridiculous.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-23-2003
Sun, 01-25-2004 - 3:26pm
Not trying to be intentionally difficult...but members of al Qaeda are recruited and trained in many countries, including many who are supposedly our 'allies' as well as within our own country.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Sun, 01-25-2004 - 7:15pm
I realize that.

I cannot put my "finger" on the link for the information, but within the past 5 weeks or so, the evidence that the ties between Iraq and the leadership of al Qaeda were more than just speculation, but were fact.