The Budget Speech - Basic Bush.(President Bush's plans for government spending)(Brief Article)

President Bush's first speech to Congress was pleasantly boring. It was boring, and pleasantly so, because it was more or less what he has been saying for two years. President Clinton's speeches often contained surprises: policy reversals (as in his 1993 speech, when he went back on his promised middle-class tax cut), ideological jujitsu (as in 1996, when he declared that "the era of big government is over" even as he crowed over his defeat of the Republicans in the budget battles), tactical tricks (as in 1998, when he turned Social Security into a powerful argument against tax-cutting).

What Bush's speeches have lacked in drama they have made up in consistency. His priorities are, as they have always been, tax cuts, defense, education, Social Security, and Medicare. He wants to restrain the growth of the federal government, but has no intention of cutting it. He favors bipartisanship and certain antipoverty initiatives. The mood of his speeches changes with the venue-before the Republican convention, he was tough on his opponents and concerned with character; at his inauguration, he was highfalutin; in front of Congress, he was programmatic-but the underlying message is the same. Like his previous speeches, Bush's address before Congress was nicely written and shrewdly constructed.

In one respect, however, Bush's speech resembled Clinton's before Congress: It was bloated and unreflective, just like the government it surveyed. ("And I propose we make a major investment in conservation by fully funding the Land and Water Conservation Fund.") Today's federal government is so large that it takes an hour to touch on, and only touch on, its major features. Bush's address was Clintonian, too, in its equation of spending levels with commitment: "Values are important, so we have tripled funding for character education."

As a political act, Bush's speech will be judged in light of the success he is universally acknowledged to have enjoyed so far. That success, as is often remarked, reflects the uncommon degree of Republican unity that now obtains. The causes of this unity are that the Republican establishment has become more conservative, and that the conservative movement has become more established. Or to put it another way, both groups have stopped pitting principle and ...