Shell game: Bush's domestic agenda.

The State of the Union message, a grand pulpit, was bound to give the president a lift, but it hasn't quieted the murmur of disquiet. Looking to 2004, Democrats, rather tentatively, are beginning to find their voices, hopeful that the wind of change in last fall's elections was just a thunderstorm and not a tornado, while Republicans, still confident, are sensing dangers and starting to look carefully around political corners.

After all, the real state of the union is uneasy. The all-but-inevitable war with Iraq may even be relatively low on the public's list of worries: it will, after all, be far away; the outcome isn't in doubt; we've

learned to expect, rightly or not, that casualties will be low, suffered by a military composed of volunteers. Probably, the most pervasive concern about a possible war is that it may neglect or fuel terrorism, a danger much closer to home, where Americans already face the uncertainties attendant on lagging markets and high unemployment, globalization and technological change.

The Columbia tragedy only confirmed September 11, 2001: American society is powerful but intricate, a regime where small failures and forces can cause desperate hurts. And in our different ways, almost all of us are troubled by a world in which the old boundaries and guidelines--political and economic, but also moral--seem no longer to hold, one that is more open but evidently less secure. So it is hardly surprising that the president's State of the Union address, despite its triumphalism, was relatively somber and long on the effort to reassure.

Despite the claim that polls do not influence his policies (which no one really believes), the president pays much closer attention to the public's mood than his father did. His speech touched on all the conservative themes that have characterized his administration. But rhetorically, Bush was staking a claim to the center, coming down strongly on all the broadly popular things--jobs, education, prescription drugs, and the environment--and offering some rather showy evidences of his compassion.

The problem, of course, was the remarkable lack of connection, at least in domestic affairs, between the president's words and his policies: on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart made it into a running joke. Research on the hydrogen-powered car is a nice gesture, for example, but George W. Bush as an environmentalist is about as convincing as the Shakespeare put on by the Duke and the Dauphin in Huck Finn. Similarly, when the president denounced the influence of "bureaucrats, trial lawyers, and HMOs" on health care, he got in some good licks at trial lawyers and malpractice suits, but neglected to mention that his proposed reform of Medicare would present elderly Americans with a choice between (relatively benign) public bureaucrats and HMOs, which sounds like something less than putting "doctors and nurses and patients back in charge."

Despite admirable exceptions like his aids initiative, Bush's agenda, especially in domestic affairs, continues to be dominated by tax cuts, questionable as economic stimuli, certain (despite some presidential "fuzzy math") to be of disproportionate benefit to upper-income Americans, and driven in fact by the ideological aim of scaling back the federal government. In relation to a wide range of goals, Bush is like a congregant who shouts "Hallelujah!" and "Amen!" but looks somewhere else when the collection plate is passed. In education, he offers mandates and standards, but precious little money to make them effective; in the fight against domestic terrorism, the administration rebuffed Congress's effort to provide more adequate funding; even on the front lines, in Afghanistan, the administration is apparently attempting nation-building on the cheap. And so on: in his address, the president gave his proposals to support mentoring and to combat addiction--programs that would cost just over a billion dollars--much more time than he devoted to his more controversial ideas about Social Security and about two-thirds as much as he spent on health care. Talk, as they say, is cheap, especially talk that affords the opportunity for touching flourishes like the president's anecdote about the Healing Place Church in Baton Rouge.

Maybe the president and his staff think that it all hangs together, but it is hard not to suspect that the administration is betting that the majority of the public won't notice the disconnect between words and policies, that it will take the sentiments and spins as the true measure of practice. It's a shrewd calculation, but also a risky one, especially with the political opposition stirring.

The congressional response to the president's domestic agenda was remarkably partisan, and much of official Washington seemed to be listening with a raised eyebrow. The mood carried over even to foreign policy: the Joint Chiefs sat silent when the president vowed to disarm Saddam Hussein, if necessary, without Security Council approval, and gave point to that reserve by applauding when the president went on to proclaim that, in the event of conflict, the United States will prevail. And outside of Washington, the polls are telling us the public is not buying large parts of the Bush agenda.

It should also be obvious that this is no time for the president to be risking a credibility gap. In making his case against Iraq, Bush asked the public, in critical respects, to take him at his word, to accept unspecified evidence and intelligence reports--especially dubious in the case of Iraq's links to terrorists--and if need be, to support his virtually unilateral determination of the need for military intervention.

A week later, Colin Powell offered better evidence more persuasively at the UN. So far, the public remains hesitant, fearful a commitment in Iraq will last longer and cost more than the presumed easy military victory.

Still, none of this spells any serious trouble for Bush in 2004. Bill Clinton had it right in his analysis of the elections of 2002: troubled by their multiple vulnerabilities, most Americans want a president who will take charge, who suggests strength of purpose and a determination to put a human stamp on events. George W. Bush fits that description pretty well: to his critics, Bush's vision is wrong-headed and rigid and potentially brittle, but Bush is a moralist with a fairly clear set of goals and a taste for bold measures. And it is very unlikely that Bush can be beaten by any rival, however able and right-thinking, who does not seem at least as strong. That's the Democrats' dilemma: the candidates on the scene are vaguely whiny (like Joe Lieberman, a bad campaigner whose nomination would invite defection to the Greens) or too modulated (John Kerry) or are tainted by ambiguities (like Dick Gephardt's flip-flops on abortion, or the fact that John Edwards is a trial lawyer and not terribly popular in his home state, or that Al Sharpton is Al Sharpton). Howard Dean may be the most promising of the lot, but among other problems, he has no serious credentials in foreign policy.

Some Democrats are flirting with General Wesley Clark, a somewhat unknown commodity, and in terrible truth the party's best candidate would probably be John McCain (who has sidled a bit to the left in domestic policy), if he were not a loyal Republican. Other candidates may emerge or someone may catch on, but up to this point, the Democrats have only faint hopes and fantasies.

Even so, Bush's recent problems may be portents. Bush political adviser Karl Rove, a good historian, likes to compare the president to William McKinley, who built a new Republican majority (as well as the first American empire). It may help Democrats to remember that McKinley's presidency also opened the door to Theodore Roosevelt and hence to the Progressive era. The old Progressives had faults aplenty, but lack of moral muscle was not among them, and as E. J. Dionne argued some time ago, they are not the worst models for the Democrats for 2004 and beyond.

Wilson Carey McWilliams, a frequent contributor, teaches political science at Rutgers University.