STATE OF THE UNION: Command Performance.(Brief Article)

The State of the Union address was the speech of a commander in chief. The war began and ended it, and the war was the backdrop of the domestic items in the middle. When President Bush and Sen. Kennedy made their friendly little waves to each other, it was not two partisan pols maneuvering for public advantage, or enjoying the faux-bonhomie of the Beltway. The commander-in-chief was confidently greeting a prominent domestic figure; the sense of their relative importance was never in doubt.

Bush committed the country to a long and open-ended war. He warned us of terrorists worldwide, and -- in a crucial addition to his rhetoric - - of hostile states pushing hard for weapons of mass destruction. The headlines focused on the "axis of evil" -- Iraq, Iran, and North Korea -- but Bush himself was not so restrictive. "States like these [emphasis added] and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil." Don't fret, Syria and Somalia: The club is still open for members. There was more: "Some governments," Bush said, "will be timid in the face of terror. . . . If they do not act, America will." How long will what Bush called "this campaign" last? It "may not be finished on our watch." Bush's watch will last almost three more years, seven

if he is reelected. How much longer than seven years? In his peroration, he called this "a decisive decade." Europe, and Europeanized elites here, are expecting the terror war to wind down. But George W. Bush has signed up for a very long haul, with much expense, and potentially much suffering ahead.

The president proposed a large, and necessary, increase in defense spending (that Cold War word change, whereby the Department of War became the Department of Defense, now, after 9/11, rings true). With guns came butter. In the middle of his speech the 9/10 Bush, the compassionate conservative, reasserted himself, as he made passing references to Head Start, "a quality teacher in every classroom," a patients' bill of rights, Medicare coverage of prescription drugs. He presented a new USA Freedom Corps, a nationally sponsored ...