Locating the State of the Union

George Driving Around the Washington Baghdad. The problem with the last build-up in Baghdad was that American troops were not only not able to suppress the sectarian strife, they were not even relevant to the conflict. They ended up DAB, driving around Baghdad, with no particular place to go. With the State of the Union address, George Bush shows a similar problem. Sandwiched between Hillary Clinton's announcement of her presidential candidacy and the Senate resolution against the surge, President Bush only commanded the headlines for twenty-four hours.

Not Moving the Kool-Aid. President Bush was probably hoping that no one would watch the State of the Union. Support for the surge actually dropped after President Bush's address a couple of weeks ago and it dropped the most among people who watched Bush's speech. Public hostility to the President has risen to the extent that President Bush is no longer an effective spokesman for his own policies. It's not like Dick Cheney, Bill Kristol, Joe Lieberman or any of the other war advocates have any credibility either. Today, Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin referred to Dick Cheney as "delusional." The Bush administration can no longer sell its Kool-Aid to the public.

Where the Action is. Surprisingly enough, the immediate fate of the Bush administration is being decided in the Republican Senate caucus as John McCain and John Warner engage in a duel to determine whether a Senate resolution against the surge will be a partisan Democratic effort or a bi-partisan expression of the will of the people. If McCain succeeds in limiting Republican support for the resolution to 2 or 3 Senators, President Bush may have a little breathing room to determine if the surge is workable. If Warner wins and the anti-surge resolution gets more than 60 votes, it will be the equivalent of a no confidence vote on the Bush administration. The surge will become a renegade military operation.

Will the Right-wing Survive. Back in 2002 and 2003, I used to wonder if the Bush administration would end up destroying conservative government all over the world. After all, John Poindexter and William Bennett were talking openly about overthrowing traditional governments in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Now it looks like the Bush administration is destroying American conservatism. The right-wing has been the driving organizational, ideological, and financial force in the Republican Party since the election of Bill Clinton in 1992. However, the Iraq War is the right-wing's war and the elections of 2006 were not only a repudiation of George Bush, they were a repudiation of the Republican Right. Given that the surge is another idea emerging from the right, will the failure of the surge condemn the right-wing even further in the eyes of the public? That's one of the reasons why ultra-conservatives like Sam Brownback are cool towards the war. They don't want to see the entire right-wing agenda sink with the Bush administration.