Very good, short article.David Frum: Bush at his Best [SOU Reaction]
Excerpt:
Double or nothing: that was the theme of the president’s dazzling speech. Bold, bold, bold – bold on social security reform, bold on controlling the growth of government, bold on legal and tax reform, bold in daring to mention nuclear energy, bold on social issues including marriage, bold on judges, and bold on foreign policy and the war on terror. Minutes before the beginning of the speech, new National Security Adviser Steve Hadley announced that he had promoted Elliot Abrams as one of his deputies – Abrams being one of the administration’s strongest and most consistent advocates of American strength and the expansion of freedom worldwide.
The speech was long, but not wordy: Its power came not from poetic flourishes, but from the clarity of its message and the firmness of its purpose. And yet the speech was not uncompromising or harsh. Without trimming his conservative principles, the president reaffirmed his commitment to a compassionate approach to AIDS, poverty, and gang violence, and he affirmed a renewed national commitment to defendants in death penalty cases.
Like his first three states of the union, but unlike his fourth, this speech was superbly focused. It was not weighted down with secondary and tertiary initiatives, slipped in by adroit bureaucrats or by poll-minded politicos. There was no striving for effect, no purple passages. It’s too often assumed that flowery rhetoric is powerful rhetoric. The reverse is more like it. A determined message delivered in clear, unmistakable words packs more punch than a namby-pamby message wrapped in fine phrases.
The president left no doubt that Social Security will be his supreme priority in this second term – and this is as it should be. Nothing this president can do at home will have longer and more profound consequences than the creation of ownership accounts. Tax changes come and go: The great tax reform of 1986 was undone in part in 1991 and then again in 1993 and was very nearly unraveled altogether by the year 2000. But the conversion of the unreliable promises of a state pension system into the solid reality of assets in your own hands, protected by the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution. Bush directly challenged the Democrats’ trust-fund myth – the idea that the system will be okay into the 2040s because the Congress has written a lot of IOUs to itself. And he framed the issue exactly correctly: as one of character and courage against self-delusion and cowardice.
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