State Of The Union

Echoing the limited agenda President Bush outlined in his State of the Union address, congressional Democrats are eyeing their second year in the majority with much-diminished expectations. Gone are the grandiose promises of legislation to bring the troops home from Iraq, which dominated the Democratic agenda last year and nearly ground business on Capitol Hill to a halt.

As President Bush prepares to deliver his first State of the Union address to a Democratic-controlled Congress tonight, he may be at the lowest point in his six-year presidency. Yet on domestic policy, at least, the president may have an opportunity to revive his fortunes on several fronts, including healthcare, immigration and energy policy.

Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, set to deliver the Democratic rebuttal to today's State of the Union address, suggested Monday that the United States is spending too much on reconstruction in Iraq while ignoring the rebuilding of New Orleans. Webb said his "gut instinct" tells him not to support more funding for Iraq without a full accounting of the money already spent there.

Can this presidency be saved? That's the question that loomed Tuesday as President Bush gave his State of the Union speech in the most inhospitable climate he has ever faced for his annual address to Congress. In proposing a short list of initiatives on healthcare, immigration and energy, Bush gave more attention than he has in past speeches to domestic issues.

President Bush, seeking to regain political ground lost to the new Democratic-led Congress, called Tuesday for bipartisan action on energy and other domestic issues but forcefully defended his unpopular decision to send more U.S. troops to Iraq. Delivering his annual State of the Union address before both houses of Congress -- with the nation's first female speaker of the House, Rep.

Congress has changed, but our responsibilities have not. Each of us is guided by our own convictions -- and to these we must stay faithful. Yet we are all held to the same standards and called to serve the same good purposes: To extend this nation's prosperity ... to spend the people's money wisely ... to solve problems, not leave them to future generations ... to guard America against all evil and to keep faith with those we have sent forth to defend us.

When power changes hands in the nation's capital, the shift is palpable. And nowhere was the recent electoral cataclysm more evident than in the halls of Congress on Tuesday. As President Bush prepared to deliver his sixth State of the Union address with the lowest approval rating of his presidency, congressional Democrats who couldn't get airtime on the local news six months ago shared brownies and coffee with CBS anchor Katie Couric.

Democrats gearing up to challenge President Bush's Iraq war plan added a personal note to their campaign Tuesday as Virginia Sen. Jim Webb drew on his family's history of military service to accuse the president of betraying the trust of those fighting today. "We trusted the judgment of our national leaders," said Webb, a Vietnam veteran and former Navy secretary whose father served in the Air Force after World War II and whose son is a Marine serving in Iraq.

President Bush's proposals to reduce U.S. gasoline consumption by 20% in 10 years include more specific and ambitious new goals than in previous White House statements, but they also appear to rely on assumptions about energy markets, politics and technology that some experts say are debatable, and include some apparent contradictions.

Will President Bush put the "-ic" back in "Democratic"? That was the hot topic around Washington on Monday after the president was asked why, during his State of the Union address last week, he referred to Congress' new "Democrat majority." "That was an oversight," Bush said in an interview Monday with National Public Radio. "I'm not trying to needle.... I didn't even know I did it." The issue of whether it is a slur to refer to the Democratic Party without the "-ic" has become an irritant.