JOHN BRUMMETT Advertisement

There's an emerging conventional wisdom about President Bush's seventh State of the Union speech. It's that this was an adequate address, better than most of his, but, like the one delivering it, mostly perfunctory and instantly irrelevant.

It's that the unpopular and embattled president offered merely more of the same on Iraq. It's that he managed, on domestic policy, to be too moderate for his own partisans and too timid for the new Democratic majorities.

But conventional wisdom is often wrong. We'll know about this one in a few years. Will immigrants carry guest worker cards? Will most of us be driving hybrid cars getting 40 to 50 miles per gallon, or pumping biofuel made on the farms of Iowa and Arkansas instead of gasoline refined from OPEC oil?

If so, it might mean that George W. made a significant domestic difference in his last two years. If not, it might mean his eight years actually were finished after six.

Perfunctory and adequate -- those uninspiring adjectives apply precisely.

Bush was so anxious to get the State of the Union over with that he turned in the middle of the opening applause to ask of Speaker Nancy Pelosi: "Ready to get started?" In other words: "Would you please pound that gavel because the sooner we can get on with this the better?"

He then kept it short and declarative in style and to the point in substance. He apparently had rehearsed, except on pronouncing "nuclear," the continued butchering of which must simply reflect his stubbornness.

Bush was compelling only when he took five minutes to come out four-square against evil terrorism. He then lost momentum when he attempted the ill-fated parlay, advancing the only point he has left on Iraq, which is that, OK, the Iraq war wasn't about al-Qaida and other terrorism when I started it, but it is now and we can't afford to lose.

Burdened with an international and military quagmire and confronting a Democratic majority, Bush's real challenge was to find a way to fashion a domestic policy agenda.

Smartly, he limited his focus to three issues -- health insurance reform, alternative energy and immigration. Necessarily, he tried to fashion moderate positions that might bring along Democrats. Problematically, he had no choice but to distance himself from his conservative base, which couldn't be satisfied merely by Bush's reference to the Democrat, not Democratic, Party.

His health care proposals are dead on arrival. He proposes to grant a tax deduction to help people buy health insurance. But many of the people without health insurance don't make enough for a health care deduction to amount to anything more than a buck or two on their taxes.

He also wants to take Medicaid away from public hospitals and get states to design innovative ways to use that same money to extend it to the uninsured. It's a shell game.

That leaves immigration and alternative fuels.

There's his proposal, deeply resented on his right flank but widely liked among Democrats, to grant guest worker status to illegal immigrants gainfully employed and out of trouble. It might go somewhere if Democrats put politics aside and took the risk that Bush might engender good will among Hispanic voters for otherwise undeserving Republicans.

And if he's serious about mandating ethanol and biofuels and insisting on ever-toughening fuel efficiency standards for motor vehicles well into the middle of the next decade, then Democrats ought to march with him in tribute to the forthcoming winner of the Oscar for best documentary. Why, that's Al Gore, of course.

John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com.