WASHINGTON, DC -- The State of the Union speech is the Super Bowl of American politics. And if you can't get into the US Capitol -- where President George W. Bush gave the 214th such address in the history of the United States -- the next-best place to be is in the basement bar of the Hay-Adams Hotel. A mere stone's throw away from the White House, the place, called "Off the Record," is a plush watering hole for politicos.

Like most bars in Washington tonight, the only television in Off the Record is tuned to Bush's speech. As the president glides neatly from the economy to AIDS to Iraq, the bar is quiet but wholly engaged. Bush's rhetoric ("America's purpose is more than to follow a process") and applause lines ("the course of this nation does not depend on the decisions of others") causes no outburst even in this most political of bars, but rather a solemn nodding of heads in strong and silent assent.

When the speech is over, the chatter begins -- drowning out the Democratic response of Washington governor Gary Locke. As one might expect in a place so close to the White House, the hubbub is overwhelmingly positive. Even the sternest critic must concede a structural genius to the 2003 State of the Union address. The president eschewed the traditional Gong Show-style shout-outs to living exemplars of policy proposals in favor of a quick glide through the nation's economic disaster, a pull on the heartstrings for the AIDS pandemic, a nod to the faith-based hymnal, and then on to the meat of the evening's menu -- a case for unilateral and preemptive war against Iraq.

Let's face it: George W. Bush has shown us that he can take a pair of jacks and bluff them up to a full house.

Looking back, in fact, the 2003 Bush makes the 2002 model look weak and hesitant. This year's mawkish gimmickry of an empty chair with a fanciful ribbon aside, the 2003 address was not 2002's shell game redux. Last year's speech had no game plan and no clear policy other than to extirpate terrorists, pick a couple of new fights (with the now-infamous "axis of evil"), throw money at problems (a "small" and "short-term" deficit), and broaden the already huge tax cuts passed by Congress during the honeymoon of Bush's presidency.

But if last year's State of the Union address was fantasy, this year's speech by Bush was simply surreal. Many of the speech's rhetorical highlights -- a new drive to produce hydrogen-based vehicles that snuff out pollution, or a proposed $15 billion to fight the scourge of AIDS over the next five years -- stand in direct contradiction to the White House's actions. Take energy: the country will still be dealing with the fallout from Alaskan drilling and Vice-President Dick Cheney's clandestine coffee klatches with energy titans by the time any babies born on January 28, 2003, take their driving tests in that hydro-car. And AIDS: while the president labeled AIDS a "plague of nature" in his speech, in real life, he nominates right-wingers like HIV activist Jerry Thacker -- who deemed the virus a "gay plague" that you get from practicing a "deathstyle" -- to his Presidential Advisory Commission on HIV and AIDS. Although Thacker has since withdrawn his name from consideration, the damage was done.

Amidst all the compassion in Bush's speech were unambiguous calls to curb reproductive rights, increase federal funding of religious groups, and create a new "Terrorist Threat Integration Center" that sounds suspiciously like an ad hoc domestic-intelligence agency. Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, he threw in a trumpet blast for the abolition of all human cloning that took in none of the nuance of that highly charged debate.

Even more surreal, however, was the solid 30-plus minutes in the State of the Union that touched on foreign policy. It was a half-hour that fell straight through the looking glass. The president skimmed the threat of North Korea (130 words), lingered for a mere 18 words on the bloody conflagration between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, completely ignored substantive debate on the failures of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to aid in the war on terror, and refused to acknowledge the US government's continuing failure to round up senior members of Al Qaeda.

But even more troubling -- especially when viewed against the speech's harsh rhetoric and recycled "facts" used to bolster a case for military action against Iraq -- was Bush's refusal to acknowledge his administration's bungling of the war in Afghanistan. Far from the "liberation" of Afghanistan claimed by the president, the US war on the cheap so celebrated by Bob Woodward's 2002 book Bush at War (Simon & Schuster) allowed Osama bin Laden to escape and has left much of that country under the continued rule of warlords. It has also exposed US troops to continuing attacks from the regrouped forces of Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and disgruntled warlords.

Mere hours before Bush spoke, American troops in Afghanistan saw their largest battle since last spring, when they fought against guerrillas allied with former US-client-warlord-turned-foe Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. It was a tribute to the surrealism of Bush's speech that, as the sound of gunfire echoed in Afghanistan, all he had to say about the situation was that the US is "helping them secure their country, rebuild their society and educate all their children: boys and girls."

And as far as the connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq is concerned, one of the most prominent authorities on the deadly terrorist group remains unimpressed by the evidence offered up to date -- including Bush's stab at connecting those dots in the State of the Union, during which he insisted that "Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of Al Qaeda."

Peter Bergen, author of Holy War, Inc. (Free Press, 2001) and a fellow at the New America Foundation, told me after the speech that the Saddam/Osama connection "is really [the administration's] default mode, isn't it?" Bergen pointed me to his December article in the Nation, in which he pooh-poohs the Iraq/Al Qaeda link as "somewhere between tenuous and nonexistent." "Al Qaeda members live in 60 countries around the globe," Bergen wrote in the Nation, "so by the law of averages a few of them will show up in Iraq. Indeed, intelligence estimates suggest there are some 100 Al Qaeda members at large in the United States, although that is not an argument to start bombing Washington."

THAT SAID, Bush's speech swung deftly from rhetorical vine to rhetorical vine, leaping over vast stretches of domestic economic quagmire and international peril. But it left holes big enough for a battalion of tanks to rumble through. The biggest, of course, was Bush's papering over of his administration's abject failure to truly eliminate the terrorist threat posed by Al Qaeda.

"All told," crowed the president, "more than 3000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. And many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way: they are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies." The line won a standing ovation from the assembled audience in the Capitol. But you had to wonder: among the "3000 suspected terrorists," was the president including the 1200 people (when the Justice Department stopped counting in November 2001) swept up in the Justice Department's post 9/11 dragnet? And the speech made no mention of the White House's steady campaign against civil liberties -- including the establishment of the "Total Information Awareness" project headed up by notorious Iran-contra mastermind John Poindexter.

On the economy, Bush's bid to make tax cuts of more than $670 billion immediate and permanent offered little hope of curbing the rapidly ballooning federal deficit. Even without factoring in the cost of a war against Iraq, the federal budget will run deficits in excess of $300 billion over the next two fiscal years. Yet Bush uttered the word "deficit" exactly once in his State of the Union address, when he said: "Lower taxes and greater investment will help this economy expand. More jobs mean more taxpayers and higher revenues to our government. The best way to address the deficit and move toward a balanced budget is to encourage economic growth and to show some spending discipline in Washington, DC."

In another rhetorical gambit, Bush cloaked the red meat that the speech held for his right-wing base with a gauzy film of his trademark "compassionate conservatism." In this regard, lines such as "Instead of bureaucrats and trial lawyers and HMOs, we must put doctors and nurses and patients back in charge of American medicine" are astounding in their sheer audacity. The president took this tack often in the first half-hour of his speech, which dealt primarily with domestic issues. The White House's controversial energy policy -- its origins still shrouded in secrecy -- was couched in terms of "efficiency" and "energy independence." The administration's controversial "Healthy Forests Initiative" -- which argues that more logging on federal lands will "save" forests -- was hailed as a way "to help prevent the catastrophic fires that devastate communities, kill wildlife, and burn away millions of acres of treasured forests." A renewed pitch for his equally controversial "faith-based" initiative was veiled in a gossamer web of finely tuned words that evoked the pain of drug addiction.

Even the most worthy portions of the White House's domestic agenda -- as laid out in the State of the Union -- are worth a raised eyebrow. Take Bush's call for "$1.2 billion in research funding so that America can lead the world in developing clean, hydrogen-powered automobiles." Jason Mark, the head of the Union of Concerned Scientists' Clean Vehicles Program, noted that the speech gave the administration a 16-year window to get the clean-energy cars "from laboratory to showroom" in America.

"Though we share the president's vision and goal of a hydrogen future," Mark argues, "oil dependence is a problem right now. Solutions that will take effect by 2020 alone are not enough. With a sad track record on fuel-economy standards, the Bush administration could be doing far more to help improve the efficiency of our cars and trucks right now with off-the-shelf technology."

Perhaps even more surprising was the president's call for $15 billion in HIV/AIDS-related funding -- with $10 billion in new money earmarked to fight the deadly virus and pandemic. This proposal, too, was wrapped in stirring rhetorical flourishes, including Bush's retelling of one South African doctor's plaintive cry that "we have no medicines, many hospitals tell people, `You've got AIDS. We can't help you. Go home and die.' " Bush declared: "In an age of miraculous medicines, no person should have to hear those words."

One reporter with whom I spoke just after the speech -- a writer who has covered AIDS-related beats both in the US and abroad -- observed that Bush's plan offers "a huge sum of money, more than Clinton ever proposed." Yet he warned that "the devil is in the details. With this administration's history on sexual-health policies . . . you have to wonder how much of this is going to be used to raise discussion globally about condoms? Will a huge chunk of the money go to abstinence-based education? How much will go to treatment?"

THERE'S A REASON that the presidency is called a "bully pulpit," though the Bush administration's drum beat of war against Iraq has placed more emphasis on the first word of the term. The president made a nod to the term's second word when he waxed eloquent about his faith-based initiative. Evoking Lewis E. Jones's 1899 hymn "There Is Power in the Blood," Bush observed that "there is power -- wonder-working power -- in the goodness and idealism and faith of the American people."

The original hymn, of course, is not about "the goodness and idealism and faith of the American people." It's about the "blood of the Lamb," and the hymn's first stanza goes as follows:

Would you be free from the burden of sin?
There's pow'r in the blood, pow'r in the blood;
Would you over evil a victory win?
There's wonderful pow'r in the blood.

There was tremendous power in the "blood" that Bush evoked in the second half of his State of the Union address, when he laid out a case for war against Iraq. The assembled television pundits gave the president very high marks on this section of the speech. CNN's Jeff Greenfield, for instance called Bush's domestic remarks "pedestrian," but argued that "I heard a foreign-policy speech -- or the Iraq part of the speech -- that was in effect written in steel. A declaration of war in the most serious words."

Tim Russert told MSNBC: "This was not a declaration-of-war speech, but this was clearly a countdown-to-war speech, and February is the shortest month of the year."

CBS's Dotty Lynch cited an instant poll that showed that "81 percent of Americans said they believed that President Bush had the same priorities for America that they had" and concluded her analysis by observing that "this speech, and at least the instant reaction to it, should give the Bush folks some optimism that he still has the power to move the American public."

In many ways, these pundits echoed a posting on the Washington Post's Web site by a Fort Lauderdale, Florida, reader who noted: "My wife got goose bumps and thought Hussein must be getting worried. Is this a good thing?" Whether the power of blood -- and goose bumps -- will win out is a question that remains open, but just barely. The question of whether pursuing war with Iraq (contained and constrained by UN inspectors and world attention) is a good thing -- especially as Osama remains at large, Afghanistan remains unpacified, and North Korea flaunts its weapons and openly blackmails the United States -- looms larger and mostly unanswered by George W. Bush.

In the real world, that answer was what most of us watching the speech were waiting for. In Bush's world, though, he's already answered that question -- or doesn't feel that he has to.

Richard Byrne can be reached at richardbyrne1@earthlink.net.

Issue Date: January 31 - February 6, 2003