My Turn: Bush faces daunting challenges
President Bush created quite a stir, at home and abroad, with his second inaugural address. He spoke briefly, but boldly, about his grand scheme to spread freedom and democracy around the world. His overall theme would have made Thomas Jefferson proud. In about 21 minutes, he mentioned words like “freedom” and “liberty” at least 40 times.
The president’s critics leaped on his remarks with vigor, calling them omens of aggression, and worse.One of my Democratic colleagues even predicted, darkly, that all this is a prelude to an attack on Iran. Others have parsed his prose, perhaps seeking evidence of ulterior motives lurking there in what he said.
After his speech, several supporters, including his father, sprang to the president’s defense, citing previous presidents, including both Roosevelts, who had said many of the same things the president said in his speech.
All this fuss over the president’s speech would be mere folderol, except for this: When the president of the United States speaks, millions, maybe billions, of people receive his message, directly or indirectly, all around the world. In this age of instantaneous communications, words and their meanings matter more than ever.
The challenge for President Bush, it seems to me, is to use what Teddy Roosevelt called the “bully pulpit” to inform his manifold audiences more fully about what his inaugural message really means, and then to persuade them that his views are reasonable. Obviously, it is easier to inform than it is to persuade.
The president’s upcoming State of the Union Address would be a a good place to start. He could focus part of his message on how he plans to translate his grandiose political goals into practical foreign and domestic policies. For example, does he see the spread of democracy as solely the mission of the United States, or is there room for multilateral cooperation with other democratic nations? A unilateral approach to such a daunting mission seems unlikely to succeed, especially in those parts of the world where the U.S. has lost prestige.
The president also needs to give us a sense of which elements of national power he plans to emphasize in achieving his goals. In foreign policy, he has an impressive array of options. These include day-to-day diplomacy, foreign aid, sanctions, covert operations, and military action. Assurance that military action would be the last resort, not the first or second, might calm the fears of those who are genuinely uneasy about his motives.
As our presence in Iraq demonstrates daily, foreign policies incur costs, human and financial. How does President Bush plan to balance his foreign policy goals with his domestic agenda, including Social Security reform, tax reform, tort reform, and so on?
Beyond his State of the Union speech, President Bush could continue to hammer his message home by having more interviews and press conferences, working with both parties in Congress, and by using his trips abroad to convince other national leaders that he is not the shoot-from-the-hip cowboy his detractors depict him to be. Done well, all of this could help President Bush get, and keep, the public support he needs to succeed in his ambitious goals for America and the world.
Thomas B. Vaughn is a Warren County columnist and a politics and communications professor at Motlow College.