Musings on the SotU

I forced myself to watch the president's State of the Union address last night, as I generally do every year even when I don't want to. This was one of those years. But, I thought the speech was basically conventional, without anything particularly striking about it at all.

- Bush's continued the same lame defenses of his end-run around FISA that we've been hearing for weeks ("It remains essential to the security of America. If there are people inside our country who are talking with Al Qaida, we want to know about it, because we will not sit back and wait to be hit again."), still refusing to answer the very basic question of what made it impossible to work within the FISA framework and get the 72-hour retroactive permission if necessary.

- I applaud the president's recognition that "here we have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world." And the additional funding he says he'll seek for new research would certainly be useful. However, we must take immediate steps to reduce consumption, and that means increasing fuel economy standards and enforcing speed limits in the short-run. It's true, we must fund ways to move beyond petroleum, but that's not going to happen overnight (and given this president's track record on following through with pledges for research funding, it's not going to happen anytime soon).

- One of my favorite moments, when I actually laughed, came when Bush was discussing Social Security reform, and said "Congress did not act last year on my proposal to save Social Security...", at which point the Democrats gleefully jumped to their feet and applauded fiercely. Amusingly done. Of course the future of Social Security is a serious problem, and it will be interesting to see which members of Congress are chosen to sit on the announced "commission" to study it and make proposals. I've thought for a long time that a bipartisan panel was probably the only way anything was going to get done in this area, so hopefully they'll come up with something useful.

- Another favorite moment: Bush mentioned "earmark reform" favorably, and almost no one in the chamber clapped. Except for John McCain, on whom the camera focused briefly as he smiled and applauded all alone. Earmark reform certainly is going to be a tough fight, there's no doubt about that.

So all in all, a forgettable speech - not awful, not great. Will it propel Bush's poll numbers any higher? Doesn't seem all that likely.

Joe Gandelman at TMV has a great post of analysis and reaction from across the blogosphere, which you shouldn't miss. The Bull Moose's take is also up.