New York Times on Bush Speech

George Bush tried to be an Alchemist last night and turn lead into gold. The The New York Times does a decent job of taking his speech apart piece by piece.

Despite the enormous changes the United States has undergone since the last election, from terror attacks to recession, Mr. Bush has been sticking resolutely to the priorities he brought into the office in 2001. He won his tax cuts and his education initiative. American foreign policy managed to wind up focused on the same country on which Mr. Bush and his advisers had fixated from the beginning.

Each of those policies has cost the nation dearly: the tax cuts have exploded the budget deficit, Mr. Bush has failed to finance his education programs adequately, and the war in Iraq has been fumbled from the day Baghdad fell. Nobody expected the president to admit that any of his initiatives had turned out to be less than smashing successes, but wavering voters might have been buoyed by at least a hint that the administration realizes that the course needs adjustment.

Instead, the president presented troubled, half-finished initiatives like his prescription drug plan as fully completed tasks, just as he presented the dangerous and chaotic situation in Iraq as a picture of triumphant foreign policy on a par with the Marshall Plan. He tossed out a combination of extremely vague concepts - like creating an ownership society - along with small-bore ideas like additional college scholarships. The combination of minor thoughts and squishy generalities was typical of John Kerry's convention speech as well. But Mr. Bush's contribution doesn't raise many hopes for the level of campaign discussion to come.

According to dubya, everything is going great. The war in Iraq is like the Marshall Plan? Boy, those Republicans really think were stupid don't they. And as the times correctly states, nothing new here.

There was nothing in the speech last night that suggested a new era of frankness from the White House, or hope that any of those fundamental problems would be approached with anything but the "my way or the highway" attitude Mr. Bush has used on issues like tax cuts and Iraq.

So, we won't hear anything new from the Republicans the next two months, just the same old slash and burn attacks on John Kerry.

It was depressing to hear Dick Cheney, who spoke on Wednesday night, repeat his crowd-pleasing snipe against Senator Kerry for calling for "a more sensitive war on terror." It was a phony criticism, given that Mr. Bush has used almost identical language in the past. But, worse, it signaled that Mr. Cheney and the administration's other hit men will spend the next two months trying to sell their failed approach to foreign policy, and encouraging Americans to believe that anyone who acknowledges that the United States needs to take a more patient and humble approach to the world is in league with the girlie men.