The state of the union's checkbook

• Article
• Comments ()
• Click-2-Listen
• Videos

By

Here are the words George W. Bush should have spoken to the nation last night:

"My fellow Americans: The state of the union is healthy. The economic recovery is picking up steam. We are winning the war against terrorism. Keep the faith. God bless. Good night."

If President Bush had kept it short and sweet, the American people would have stood on their living couches and thunderously applauded. Brevity is,after all, the soul of wit.

Alas, the art of short political speeches went out sometime soon after the Gettysburg Address, which was only a few hundred words and took less than 5 minutes to deliver.

Instead, Mr. Bush held us captive for just under an hour. That was an improvement over his predecessor. Bill Clinton's State of the Union addresses were 11/2 hour exercises in self-aggrandizement.

I always felt Mr. Clinton believed in his heart of hearts that if he could just go on prattling forever, he could conjure up some new multimillion-dollar program to solve every problem in America, including exterminating the fly swimming around in my soup or fixing the drip on the bathroom faucet.

Bill Clinton felt our pain so deeply there was no price he was not willing to have taxpayers bear to make us feel better. Of course, you needed a cash register to ring up the cost of Mr. Clinton's new spending pronouncements.

Mr. Bush too, has this unattractive tendency to believe there is a government agency to fix every leaky pipe in the nation. Mr. Bush may not have announced a national campaign to eradicate athlete's foot, but it wouldn't have been much of a stretch if he had. After all, he wants to send a man to Mars -- not Paul O'Neill, regrettably -- and that will cost $500 billion over 10 years. He wants to spend millions to promote holy matrimony. He wants to spend $200 million to fight obesity -- why can't we just tell fat people to stop overeating?

He says he wants to sizably increase funding for community colleges and job training and spreading democracy around the world. He wants to subsidize wheat and corn farmers. There will be more funds to fight AIDS in Africa and to purchase garbage trucks in Iraq.