It wouldn’t be fair to say that Washington, D.C., spent the past week swept up in “State of the Union Fever.” After all, with the Inauguration only a few weeks past, there’s something about a SOTU that seems … so yesterday. It’s been years since a president ascended the congressional pulpit to suggest that the State of our Union was anything other than straight-up applejack goodness for everyone and everybody, and the last one who suggested otherwise was that walking font of new age optimism, Gerald Ford. You knew going in that George W. Bush — despite having campaigned all last year vowing to fix all the problems caused by his predecessor, George W. Bush — was going to declare the nation to be in tip top shape. And so, we were thus dubbed “confident and strong.”
Of course, the “buts” started coming almost immediately after, and the biggest “but” fro this administration is definitely Social Security privatization (which is the term DCist will continue to use until we are formally given the Official GOP Talking Points Memo—we are not just going to be ignored, Karl!). The purply metaphor Bush used was the image of “a lot of grey” in the rear view mirror. Oh, no! It’s old people! And they’re — gasp! — changing lanes and moving into our blind spot! Looks like we’d better write into law a federally mandated slush fund for Wall Street investment bankers before it’s too late!
The Democrats, who were last seen singing self-pitying elegies to their own ineffectiveness in Condoleezza Rice’s hearing chamber, have surprisingly shifted course in the face of the coming debate over Social Security Reform. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, showed off his new brass pair in the hours before the SOTU, declaring: “President Bush should forget about privatizing Social Security. It will not happen.” Oooh, snap! Of course, let’s remember that it remains to be seen whether every Republican in Congress is going to support Social Security privatization, after all the 35 million-member strong AARP has not yet begun to fight, and those AARPers have a funny way of making a legislator worry about their nice safe seats.
