In practice, the State of the Union is supposed to lay out for Congress and the public the President's themes for legislative action through the coming year. In between the soaring rhetoric and grandiose pomposity, you need to highlight the various things you want to accomplish in the next twelve months. Some Addresses have worked out better over the years. Some Presidents used it as a grab bag, throwing all their plans into the hopper, stunning everybody with their overblown interests, most of which would be ignored or go down in flames. In the hyper partisan Clinton and Obama eras you occasionally had half the Congress standing and cheering while the other half sat there in stony silence or even heckled. By all accounts, the best Addresses were those in which you chose only three or four themes and hammered those alone.
The first theme was the easy one, at least in picking it out. It was only four months since the 9-11 attacks. People wanted to hear how I was going to personally hold their hands and protect them from evil. I needed to outline my plans to increase security and improve intelligence. In this I was outlining my plans for a new counterterrorism center (already under operation via an Executive Order) as well as mentioning the about-to-be completed report by the Three Amigos. We would also need to raise spending on preparedness and security, and at least change some priorities. Of course none of this would affect civil liberties, or at least so I told people. In reality, probably somewhat. On the other hand, I didn't want to say out loud what I was really thinking, that some fancy new weapons programs would need to be cut to pay for some of this. Congress might not like approving new weapons programs, but it hated cutting them, since the manufacturers would spread the subcontracting across as many Congressional districts as they could, and nobody wanted to be seen cutting jobs. Tom Ridge and I were going to have to sit down for this.
So, what was left? Defense was number one on the list, but what would be number two, or three, or four? Anything beyond that would be simply wishful thinking, and probably counterproductive. The only thing I could figure was along the lines that a strong defense required a strong economy. We were already heading into recession, much as I had pointed out with Paul O'Neill months ago. Unfortunately, the last thing you really want to do during a recession is get Congress involved. Recessions are part of the regular business cycle, boom and bust. It had been a number of years since the last major correction, and we were due. Economists know it, businessmen don't like it, politicians don't understand it. What politicians understand is campaign contributions and votes. They understand that when campaign donors and voters complain, they have to do something to show they are concerned and are fixing the problem.
As a general rule, they almost always end up doing the wrong thing. Recessions are nature's way of saying the economy was overheated, and now we are taking a breather. For instance, everything is going great guns, but wages are rising too fast and interest rates are getting too high. At some point the economy collapses, some people lose their jobs and some companies go out of business, things calm down, interest rates and wages drop to a point where they make economic sense, and people get new jobs and new companies are formed. It's painful, but it happens, and in general things will be better after than before. Every time a bubble collapses, there is a fundamental reason it failed. Meanwhile, there are certain things that can be done to alleviate the problem. The Federal Reserve can fiddle with interest rates and bank requirements and the money supply, and the Fed is fairly quick to respond to problems. Congress, on the other hand, is anything but quick and is usually pretty ham-handed when it does get involved. A typical response to a recession is that everybody hoots and hollers for six months before passing some sort of stimulus bill. Nine times out of ten, the stimulus is for the wrong part of the economy, and by the time it passes, the recession has peaked, and we are now stimulating a growing economy. The other typical choice Congress makes is to decide to cut spending just as the economy starts tanking normally, thereby aggravating the recession.
Now we were going into a recession. As such, there was no reason it would be a killer, but it would be uncomfortable, and there would be loud cries that we needed to do something. That was a given, and if I didn't handle that, somebody in Congress would, and not necessarily to the betterment of the nation. Still, there are good ways to goose the economy with government spending and bad ways. One of the bad ways is to simply cut taxes or give people checks; the money is used to either pay off credit cards (debt reduction) or is spent buying things (consumption.) Debt reduction is a good thing, but generally is only temporary. Most of the consumption goes overseas, as payments on oil or finished products – does Wal-Mart actually sell anything made in America? Good ways to spend on the economy require a longer term view. The best ways to spend would be infrastructure and research. Fill some potholes and fund some R&D projects. The money tends to stay in America and you get a much better bang for your buck. So, to fight the recession, let's invest in America, and send Congress a spending bill to do so, and make that a point in the speech.
What else do I talk about? I don't know who said it first, but it really applied here. Never let a perfectly good crisis go to waste! We had a crisis, and I needed to milk that sucker for all it was worth. I had a golden opportunity to do it, too. What I could do was dust off some of George Bush's ideas, fix them so they weren't as fucked up, and ram them through. In so doing I would be appealing to the newest Republican icon, St. George of Bush. Dust off his ideas, tweak them, wrap them in a mantle of compassionate conservatism, hoist an American flag over them, and away we would go! All I had to do was hold my nose.
It wasn't that outlandish an idea. I had high popularity right now and a lot of credibility from destroying the Taliban and Al Qaeda. That translated into political capital, which I could spend on various votes and projects. The same had occurred with George on my first trip. Unfortunately he wasted his on various horrendous efforts, setting up Homeland Security and the Transportation Safety Administration, neither of which was all that popular, and dragging the nation into a couple of losing wars. He drove a stake through his heart during Hurricane Katrina. By the end of his administration, he couldn't get Congress to agree that the sky was blue, let alone give him what he wanted.
Case in point – immigration reform. George had proposed his DREAM Act in 2001, but had then allowed it to dither around while he focused on other things. It was a great idea, but he lost focus and it died slowly and painfully. It never did get passed under any subsequent President, either. Dust it off, push it hard, and keep repeating, "We need to do it for President Bush!" Then throw in the idea that by controlling our borders, we were fighting terrorism, and the whole thing would make us safer. It needed to be done.
What I needed to do in this speech was to canonize my predecessor, and wrap what needed to be done in his mantle. If I could only figure a way to have his image smiling down at me from above, I would be all set. So, there we were – counterterrorism and security, infrastructure, research, immigration. At that point start feeding it to Matt and Mike, and get them to start writing. We weren't just going to polish that turd, we were going to fucking gold plate the son of a bitch!