• English Site
• > SPIEGEL Blog
• > Trans-Atlantic Relations

State of the Union Address

Bush Faces an Unhappy Nation

US President George W. Bush will face a nation more unified than it has been in a long time. The only problem? It is unified against him.

He's already given the speech a number of times before. But when the president of the United States strides to the lectern for the State of the Union address on Tuesday night, he'll be facing a radically different audience than he has at any point in his six years in the White House. And it is not a friendly one.

The most obvious change is the make-up of the Congress he will be addressing. Instead of having former Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert over his left shoulder, the new -- Democratic -- Speaker Nancy Pelosi will be scrutinizing his every word. In front of him, the newly Democratic-majority House and Senate will likewise be far from a friendly audience.

But it is on the living-room end of the television cameras where Bush is facing perhaps his harshest critics. The American population now regards Bush with more skepticism than it has any president since 1979, according to the latest poll taken for CBS. Only 28 percent of the American populace approves of the job the president is doing; fully 64 percent say they disapprove. A similar poll taken by the Washington Post found that 71 percent of Americans think the country is "seriously off track."

Bush's likely response? "There will be key signals to the American people that despite disagreements over the war, other work can be done," Dan Bartlett, the White House counselor, told the New York Times. In other words, he went on, "divided government does not mean we cannot govern."

But it may be too late to reinvent himself as a bipartisan leader. His plan for sending an additional 21,500 troops to Iraq has come under intense fire from both sides of the aisle -- especially since he has chosen to ignore the recommendations of the bi-partisan Iraq Study Group made in December. And his plans for domestic reforms -- intended as the cornerstone of his speech -- are not likely to fare any better.

Indeed, Democrats are already firing away at Bush's plan to help those without health insurance. The proposal would see $3.9 billion diverted from Medicaid payments to public hospitals over the next five years. An additional part of the proposal would involve higher taxes for those with adequate health-care coverage to raise money to help those with lower incomes purchase insurance. Both elements of the plan have been heavily criticized already.

Still, Bush knows that, having failed to take the American electorate with him as he tried to shift the domestic and foreign policy agenda far to the right, he now has to move his government as far to the center as possible. According to White House officials, Bush also plans to unveil new policy initiatives on energy and the environment focusing on energy conservation.

Given his stance on global warming in the past, few are holding their breath. Indeed, according to the Washington Post on Tuesday, binding caps on greenhouse-gas emissions have been ruled out. Instead, he plans to talk about alternative fuels as a way of breaking the country's addiction to oil.

More of the same in other words. But at least most of his listeners won't be terribly surprised. In fact, should he lose ground in the polls, he risks joining President Richard M. Nixon's abysmal 24 percent approval rating from August 1974, just before he resigned in the wake of the Watergate scandal. His foreign audience is also not likely to be forgiving. According to a BBC poll released on Tuesday, only 29 percent of people surveyed -- spread over 25 countries -- think that the US had a positive influence in the world. As recently as two years ago, that number was 40 percent.

cgh