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





 


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iVillage Member
Registered: 03-31-2003
Wed, 01-28-2004 - 11:25am
<> Oh, well then. Bombs away.

It's the CIA's fault...It's Clinton's fault... An op-ed in the WSJ today has the nerve to suggest that WMD were never the point to begin with. (?!) It's a good thing the Bush administration doesn't care what the rest of the world thinks, because our credibility is completely shot now. Zero. Nada.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Wed, 01-28-2004 - 1:25pm
By any chance, did that op-ed piece sort of borrow from the NRA's philosophy? I ask because my father used a logic that had me staggering. "It's not the WMD, it's the people who use them!" Gaaack--who gave the president omniescence and the ability to predict the future!? Iraq will use them but Pakistan and North Korea won't?! Let's hope it wasn't the same entity who gave him native tongue fluency!

Gettingahandle

Ignorance is Nature's most abundant fuel for decision making.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Wed, 01-28-2004 - 1:54pm
Sometimes it is, and when people try to look too deep into something that can be simple, the facts tend to be forgotten, and I am not just speaking about politics, but every day life as well.
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-31-2003
Wed, 01-28-2004 - 8:18pm
After David Kay's first report, when President Bush was faced with somewhat disappointing results in the search for WMD, he did actually assert that Saddam Hussein was himself a WMD.

To be fair, Hussein was aggressive enough to use them.

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2003
Thu, 01-29-2004 - 12:03pm
<>

My experience tells me that when something looks "simple" it usually isn't. I am not all impressed by Kay, the more he talks the more I wonder.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Fri, 01-30-2004 - 10:23am
I seem to trust him, as to this point in time, his report does not seem to be too politically biased ..plus, he has been doing this for almost the past year, and has access to information that we as ordinary people will never have access to.

Who knows. We may never know the actual truth about what actually happened to the weapons that he (Hussein) did supposedly have, unless he tells us what happened to them, and I dont think that is too likely.

I do have one question though. If the Syrian Gov't is supposedly willing to "work" with the coallition, why do they have their nickers in a twist about allowing inspectors to come in to look for evidence of Iraq's WMD program, which are supposedly hidden in their country? Makes me wonder.....

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Sun, 02-01-2004 - 1:59pm

>"And it's so well watched because New Hampshire is the first primary and has a habit not of picking the man who will eventually be president but of killing off candidates who seem to be in the polls very likely contenders.

In 2000 the valiant naval hero John McCain handsomely defeated George W Bush but you know who won in November.

The president's State of the Union address used to be a fair, often blunt, account of where the country stood in both foreign and domestic policy.

In the last 20 years, I'd say, it's become a visionary description of how close the country has come to Utopia.

Mr Bush's speech was no exception. It was a hymn to the greatness and goodness of America. He used the word America 60 times.

No mention of Bin Laden, the Taleban, balancing the budget, the country's huge debt, nor ever the two words that many people here and abroad think are together the root cause of both the invasion of Iraq and the worldwide war on terrorism.

Those words are Israel and Palestine.

Mr Bush gave us no bad news. His address could very aptly have been recited against a muted chorus of Onward Christian Soldiers."<


Quote from op-ed..........


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/letter_from_america/3429883.stm

cl-Libraone





 


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