Knight Ridder Tribune
WASHINGTON - History will remember President Bush's commanding speech to the nation nine days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. But his first State of the Union address Tuesday night might be a bigger test of his leadership.
As he addresses a joint session of Congress for the third time, the immensely popular Bush must try to convince the public that he can lead the nation not only in a faraway war against a foreign enemy, but in a home front battle against a faltering economy.
"It's a new year. People are upbeat, and the president will deliver a roadmap for security and economic growth," said one senior White House official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
He must define America's direction during a period of unusual uncertainty.
Bush's response to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, his soothing words and forceful action, united the nation and gave the president the political and moral authority he needed to wage war against terrorism.
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"That was in some ways a soft pitch. He rose to the occasion," said Bruce Buchanan, a presidential expert at the University of Texas at Austin. "But domestic politics is a much tougher slog."
While Americans have strongly backed Bush in the war, many have reservations about other parts of his agenda: his tax cuts, his energy proposal, his prescription drug plan, his desire to privatize part of Social Security and his faith-based initiative.
"He's more popular than many of his policies," Buchanan said.
Bush's job is made more difficult, political experts say, in part because the war has gone well so far, even though Osama bin Laden is still at large. Americans have begun to turn their attention to other things - like the recession and their economic insecurity.
The president must turn the spotlight back on his priorities: continuing to root out terrorism worldwide, preventing further attacks at home and fixing the economy. And he must do so at a time when the Enron scandal threatens to preoccupy Washington and members of Congress are focusing on November's elections, in which both parties hope to win control of both chambers of the legislature.
"His challenge is to refocus people's attention in order to get their support for the long haul in this war," said Marshall Wittmann of the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank here. "This war is going to come at a significant cost in resources and focus.
"At the same time, he wants to focus on the war, he doesn't want to seem inattentive to American suffering in bad economic times. It's a two-fold task, and in some ways they work against each other."
Bush must convince the public to let him expand the war, while at the same time embarking on new initiatives he has yet to outline. It may not be easy.
The recession and the Sept. 11 attacks have put people out of work and reduced the government's tax revenues. That recalls the political fate suffered by Bush's father, the first President Bush, who was voted out after one term.
lost his bid for re-election because voters believed him out of touch with their economic plight.
Today, Bush's determination to spend more on the military and homeland security leaves less money for domestic programs. Meanwhile, on Bush's watch, the federal budget has slipped from four years of surpluses back into deficit spending.
White House officials are offering few glimpses into what Bush will say on Tuesday. His first address to Congress, little more than a month after taking office last year, was to lay out his initial budget. His second, on Sept. 20, was to reassure a nation badly shaken by terrorism.
Bush's task will be to translate public backing for his war leadership into support for the rest of his programs.
"He needs to find a way to use this enormous popularity that he's enjoying to advance his agenda," said John Green, the director of the Bliss Institute of Politics at the University of Akron. "That's tricky. These days, Americans tend to compartmentalize presidential performance. We saw that with Bill Clinton, and we're starting to with George Bush. They give him high marks in one place but not in another."
Then there is Enron.
Bush has close ties to the bankrupt company's former chairman Kenneth Lay, though there's no evidence to date that the administration granted Enron any special favors.
But as the Justice Department and congressional committees probe Enron's bankruptcy, potential accounting fraud, the millions of dollars lost by employees and stockholders, and the company's links to politicians, the president will be under pressure to embrace stronger business regulation and more-stringent campaign-finance legislation.
All in all, that would be a tall order for any president, and poses risks to Bush.
"You're at 80-whatever percent in the polls," said George Edwards, director of the Center for Presidential Studies at Texas A&M University. "There's only one way to go, and that's down."
