The President Reloads

President Bush wasn’t even on camera for his best moment in Wednesday night’s State of the Union address. The emotional high point was provided by a heartfelt embrace in the balcony, between the mother of an American soldier killed in action in Iraq and the daughter of one of Saddam Hussein’s victims, who proudly voted in last Sunday’s election.

It was a triumphant moment for Bush, but also a reminder that the rationale for the war has changed. If the Iraqi people’s freedom was once seen as merely a bonus from an unavoidable war, that freedom has moved to center stage as the war’s primary justification. That’s because contrary to what Bush said in a previous State of the Union speech, we now know the threat posed by Hussein was not imminent.

Given that history, Bush was wise in Wednesday’s address to restrain himself in discussing Iran and North Korea, nations he memorably described as part of a three-country “axis of evil” three years ago.

This time he stressed diplomacy, nodding to efforts by France, Germany and Britain to persuade Tehran to forgo nuclear weapons, and saying the United States is “working closely” with other governments to get Pyongyang to abandon them. That’s also a bow to realism; U.S. forces are stretched woefully thin in Iraq. Washington needs help in dealing with Iran and North Korea.

The president also deserves credit for gently prodding the regimes of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, challenging them to loosen up politically and implicitly comparing them to Morocco, Jordan and Bahrain, more liberal Arab countries. The criticism of two major allies in the Middle East suggested that his inauguration speech’s high-flown rhetoric about spreading freedom might not have been written on the wind. Bush’s proposal of a $350-million grant to the Palestinian Authority to implement political, economic and security reforms augurs well for the chances of advancing the goal of a Palestinian state in the aftermath of Yasser Arafat’s death.

Social Security Quagmire

On the domestic front, Bush shows signs of making the same blunder he made in Iraq -- getting so enamored of an admittedly gutsy choice that he comes to believe it’s an unavoidable one.

The contentious and unnecessary project of Bush’s second term is partial privatization of Social Security -- although the words “privatize” and even “private” did not appear once in his speech. Don’t get us wrong: There is a real imbalance coming in Social Security, as the president explained quite well. But as he also said, the earliest moment when this imbalance can be labeled an actual crisis is more than four decades away. (Note: 2018 is just when the fund starts paying out more than it takes in. It is not a crisis.)

In his address, Bush strongly hinted that he deserves credit for taking up this issue so far in advance. But in taking up Social Security with such zeal, he is looking past plenty of vexing issues that aren’t on a four-decade fuse. No credit for that. On the other hand, he deserves a lot of credit for saying almost explicitly that his solution will involve reducing benefits for future retirees. He did this through the clever device of listing various benefit-reducing proposals that others have suggested and that he would be willing to consider. But the message was clear, and courageous.

The truth is that any of these ideas (such as raising the retirement age), or a combination of them, would solve the Social Security problem for the rest of this century. Yet Bush insists on presenting them as preliminary steps in his plan to “save” Social Security by partially privatizing it.

Bush fleshed out his plan a bit Wednesday night, and it is starting to look like Hillarycare, the healthcare overhaul disaster of President Clinton’s first term. Every objection to the idea is addressed through another layer of complexity. Bush added several layers in his address, but no amount of complexity can hide the idea’s flaws -- such as the virtual mathematical certainty that it can’t work. (See www.latimes.com/proof for details of that claim.)

More Pressing Issues

There are plenty of truly urgent problems Bush could focus on if he weren’t so distracted by Social Security. He mentioned two of them in his speech, deficit reduction and immigration.

On the subject of the federal budget, Bush made the familiar Republican complaints about wasteful government programs and the usual promises about cutting or eliminating them. He promised to cut the deficit by half by the end of his presidency. This is a remarkably modest ambition, though one he has seemed unwilling to act upon.

Keep in mind that Bush has Republican majorities in both houses of Congress. Republicans can have any level of spending and taxes they want. It also means that they are responsible for whatever combination of spending and taxes that comes out of Washington. If Bush wanted a balanced budget, he could have one tomorrow.

Instead, he continues to illustrate what he meant by the famous phrase, “compassionate conservative”: a conservative who doesn’t mind the government spending a lot of money as long as there is no talk of raising taxes to pay for it. The State of the Union address was peppered with new proposals for spending programs and tax credits, all of which will make even Bush’s modest budget goal harder to reach.

On immigration, he said all the right things. The status quo is not acceptable, and Washington needs to come up with a way to address the nation’s need for imported labor without continuing to condone a black market of millions of undocumented workers. This isn’t a system that will be broken in several decades. It is broken now and the administration needs to be more forceful in pressing Congress for a solution.

There were plenty of crowd-pleasing items sprinkled throughout the speech. Bush sounded positively Clintonian in saying he wants a community health center in every poor county, and he sounded even less like himself when he called for funding training for defense attorneys in death penalty cases. If only he’d been so concerned about poor lawyering when he was overseeing all those executions as governor of Texas.

The president’s crowd-pleasing instinct isn’t always harmless. In calling for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, Bush once again sought to capitalize on a certain crowd’s worst instincts, hatred and intolerance.