All Stagecraft, No Statecraft

Here's a commentary on President Bush's speech to Congress by CBSNews.com's Dick Meyer:

Back then, the president was Dwight Eisenhower. Prescott Bush, the father of a future president and grandfather of the current one, was a senator from Connecticut and in the audience. Rocky Marciano was the reigning heavyweight champion. Ernest Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature. And Willie Mays was Most Valuable Player in the National League (as he properly should have been every year he played).

Our recollection, our image of that time, is of bovine affluence: Happy Days with Richie Cunningham and Fonzie. As Eisenhower said in his State of the Union address in early January forty-seven years ago, "The nation has just completed the most prosperous year in its history."

If we were fat and happy then, we're obese and delirious now.

It is striking to read Eisenhower's 1954 speech and see an American president - in what we recall as the best of times - talking about big, scary issues: a just-ended war in Korea, nuclear weapons, the Communists, segregation.

There were no comparable issues in George W. Bush's 2001 address to Congress. That doesn't, of course, mean that there are not comparable issues in society, in the world. They just weren't in the speech.

Eisenhower, like Bush, went through a laundry list of his positions on matters like tax cuts, fiscal programs, poverty, and agriculture. But unlike with Bush, that wasn't the whole speech.

Don't get me wrong: Ike's speech was not by any stretch a fascinating, philosophical or rhetorical adventure. It was dull and plodding, but it wasn't a sell job. And that is exactly what Bush delivered Tuesday night - a sell job. That's what was expected and that's what was presented. And it was hardly different from the stump speeches we heard all last year. The oratory may have been better or worse, the setting different. The substance, logically, was the same. But unfortunately, so was the tone of the speech.

Of course, it's a tone we've grown quite accustomed to under Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan. There are bits of punditry we now associate with presidential speeches, phrases like "he needs to look presidential" or "he wants to take his case straight to the American people" or "he needs to sell his program." Such clichés were invented to deal with the merger of stagecraft and statecraft that were Reagan and Clinton. And now, it's hard to assess presidential rhetoric in any other terms.

But no sane person could read Eisenhower's 1954 speech - which he gave nearly a decade after leading the D-Day invasion of World War II - and say "he was trying to look presidential." It would be silly. It's not that he was above politics in any way; it's just that an address to Congress wan't the place for a campaign snow job.

About one-third of Eisenhower's speech dealt with foreign affairs and defense. About one-tenth of Bush's speech on dealt with foreign affairs and defense. Yes, I am aware the Cold War is over. But somehow, I do think the comparison says something about how we see ourselves in the world, not just in world affairs.

Eisenhower spoke about foreign policy in the kind of complicated detail that Bush used when discussing entitlement policy. I suppose, each president knows his audience and knew what it cared about it.

And, just as you can feel the country's fear of foreign enemies in Eisenhower's speech, so you can feel the country's fear of lessened affluence in Bush's speech.

After years of economic boom that dwarfed the fifties, here's a new American president putting on the hard sell to give people money via tax cuts. Strange. There may be scads of brilliant economic, political, and moral arguments favoring Bush's tax cut plans. But it's strange that they are such a priority in a period of such plenty. The fear having of less of that plenty is palpable right now. And President Bush has called in the cavalry to protect us.

Oddly, Eisenhower warned of something like this when near the end of his 1954 speech he said, "No government can inoculate its people against the fatal materialism that plagues our age." In our age, there's no shortage of politicians with needles.

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