In its entirety, I thought the SOTU was about taking the broad, horizontal strokes of his Inaugural address and starting the process of verticalizing them, getting into detail and starting up Bismark's famous legislative sausage machine to actually get stuff done. Dr. Barnett finds this boring:
So what I got out of the speech was: I've got some domestic stuff I want to get done in second term, and I want Iraq to get better and serve as an example to the rest of the Middle East. Not exactly ambition defined, I would say, given what he did and tried to do in the first term.Again, you got the feeling the White House wanted to avoid anything expansive on foreign policy after the way in which the inaugural speech was interpreted. But to me, that's not letting Bush be Bush, and if he's gonna be president another four years, shouldn't he be?