New York, Jan 28, IRNA ,George W. Bush, struggling to stay relevant in the twilight of his presidency, delivers his final State of the Union speech tonight with an urgent new mission: heading off a US recession.
Bush is up against a hostile Congress, is competing for attention with the race to succeed him and draws criticism for his economic performance.
By heading a bipartisan effort to enact a $150 billion stimulus program, he may at least partially mitigate the legacy of his previous failures to forge consensus on revamping immigration laws and overhauling Social Security.
The specter of recession also gives him a chance to show leadership and define his final months in office through something other than the Iraq war, which has helped push his approval rating to 34 percent in the most recent Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll.
“It’s an opportunity for Bush to put something on the positive side of his legacy,” says David Kennedy, a historian at Stanford University in California.
Bush has wasted little time since early December in pushing his fast-track rescue strategy, first floating a stimulus proposal, then convening talks with congressional leaders. The reaction to his efforts will help determine whether he has any credibility left on the economy, says Leon Panetta, former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton.
“Normally, these State of the Union speeches can be pretty drab,” Panetta says.
Tonight’s address is different because the “the country is in deep economic crisis” and Americans are looking for answers from their political leaders.
Bush tonight will promise to veto any spending measure that doesn’t cut money for lawmakers’ pet projects — so-called earmarks — by half from current levels, and he’ll issue an executive order tomorrow to ignore any earmarks that aren’t a part of the law, White House spokesman Tony Fratto said.
It remains to be seen whether Bush’s speech tonight, along with his current burst of economic activism, will improve his tarnished crisis-management reputation following his response to Hurricane Katrina or reverse the widespread perception that his economic policies are out of touch with the needs of average working Americans.
Fred Greenstein, a presidential scholar and emeritus professor at Princeton University in New Jersey, says while a crisis poses an opportunity for even a weakened leader, the question for Bush remains whether he can “provide a capstone to his presidency that will give the obituaries a more positive tone than just, `This is the guy who got us in a horrible mess.'”
Bush isn’t the only actor in the anti-recession drama: Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s Jan. 22 reduction in the federal-funds rate by three-quarters of a percentage point was the largest in the two decades that the rate has been the principal tool of policy makers .
For Bush, though, the implications are political as well as economic, since success may help his fellow Republicans in the November elections.
The president is “haunted by the perception that his father lost re-election in 1992 because he was slow to respond to that recession,” says Nolan McCarty, a political scientist at Princeton.
While both Republican and Democratic presidential contenders have made the economy a dominant theme in their campaigns, Bush will be able to use his State of the Union speech to take credit for the stimulus program, which includes tax rebates of up to $600 for individuals and up to $1,200 per couple, with an additional $300 for each child.
Even though Republicans and Democrats concur on the need to act, there still may be obstacles to Bush’s ability to steer a stimulus package through Congress quickly.
Meanwhile, some Republican fiscal conservatives are critical of the package.
“Rebates haven’t worked in the past, and in my opinion they won’t work in the future,” says Jack Kemp, a former congressman and Republican cabinet official and the party’s 1996 vice presidential candidate.
“It rewards past production.” Others contend the proposed stimulus is a reflex by panicky politicians and won’t be nearly as effective as cuts in business and individual tax rates.
Bush “lacks the leverage to press for what he really wants: making his expiring tax cuts permanent,” says Bruce Altschuler, a political scientist at the State University of New York in Oswego.