I haven’t read any blogs this morning, so I wouldn’t be surprised if plenty of other people have already used the above title to describe George W. Bush’s State of the Union Address last night. You don’t have to be a Democrat to realize how strangely empty and disjointed this speech truly was: twenty minutes of abstract uplift; another twenty minutes or so restating his 2004 Fear Offensive on national security and using it to justify everything he’s doing in Iraq and at home; and then a fifteen-minute drive-by on everything else. I have no clue why the White House spent so much time over the last couple of weeks, and especially yesterday, signalling that Bush would do some heavy lifting on health care and energy. The former got one completely unoriginal graph; and the latter, which could have been lifted directly from a very brief summary of a 2004 John Kerry speech on energy independence, was a joke when you look at the administration’s actual energy policies.Corruption? An “everybody does it” sentence that seemed to suggest Bush was still a newcomer to Washington who’s not responsible for anything that happens there (oh yeah, there was that other sentence where Bush lumped together influence-peddlers and “activist judges”). Katrina? Just a spending number. The economy? Everything’s coming up roses, so long as Bush can keep “isolationists” at bay. Like a lot of people, I was wrong in anticipating the content of this speech. I figured it would be a vast exercise in damage control on all those issues the admininstration and the GOP has either screwed up or ignored. But the White House has apparently decided not to bother with anything beyond the barest kind of lip service to any topic other than national security, in the belief that this one issue trumps everything else combined. At an early morning breakfast meeting today, I heard Gov. Tom Vilsack compare Bush to a football coach who is so convinced the opposition is incapable of stopping a particular play that he’s arrogantly announcing it in advance. That play, which is sort of the Single Wing of latter-day GOP politics, is “terrorism” right up the gut. And so it should be abundantly clear to Democrats looking forward to the midterm elections that this is the play the Republicans are going to run, until we learn how to stop it.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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February 26: Tanden Confirmation Fight Not an Existential Threat for Biden Administration
This year’s big media narrative has been the confirmation saga of Neera Tanden, Biden’s nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget. At New York I wrote about how over-heated the talk surrounding Tanden has become.
Okay, folks, this is getting ridiculous. When a vote in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on the nomination of Neera Tanden was postponed earlier this week, you would have thought it presented an existential threat to the Biden presidency. “Scrutiny over Tanden’s selection has continued to build as the story over her uneven reception on Capitol Hill stretched through the week,” said one Washington Post story. Politico Playbook suggested that if Tanden didn’t recover, the brouhaha “has the potential to be what Biden might call a BFD.” There’s been all sorts of unintentionally funny speculation about whether the White House is playing some sort of “three-dimensional chess” in its handling of the confirmation, disguising a nefarious plan B or C.
Perhaps it reflects the law of supply and demand, which requires the inflation of any bit of trouble for Biden into a crisis. After all, his Cabinet nominees have been approved by the Senate with a minimum of 56 votes; the second-lowest level of support was 64 votes. One nominee who was the subject of all sorts of initial shrieking, Tom Vilsack, was confirmed with 92 Senate votes. Meanwhile, Congress is on track to approve the largest package of legislation moved by any president since at least the Reagan budget of 1981, with a lot of the work on it being conducted quietly in both chambers. Maybe if the bill hits some sort of roadblock, or if Republican fury at HHS nominee Xavier Becerra (whose confirmation has predictably become the big fundraising and mobilization vehicle for the GOP’s very loud anti-abortion constituency) reaches a certain decibel level, Tanden can get out of the spotlight for a bit.
But what’s really unfair — and beyond that, surreal — is the extent to which this confirmation is being treated as more important than all the others combined, or indeed, as a make-or-break moment for a presidency that has barely begun. It’s not. If Tanden cannot get confirmed, the Biden administration won’t miss a beat, and I am reasonably sure she will still have a distinguished future in public affairs (though perhaps one without much of a social-media presence). And if she is confirmed, we’ll all forget about the brouhaha and begin focusing on how she does the job, which she is, by all accounts, qualified to perform.