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Bush Lays Out Campaign Themes in Speech

Posted on: Wednesday, 21 January 2004, 06:00 CST

Laying out campaign themes, President Bush is hailing progress fighting terrorism, recharging the economy and helping Americans afford health care. But Democrats say his election-year State of the Union address underscores how paltry his achievements have been.

The morning after he addressed a national television audience and a joint session of Congress, Bush was embarking Wednesday on a two-day swing through Ohio, Arizona and New Mexico to highlight his job training and counterterrorism proposals.

Those were among several plans he said he would offer in his 2005 budget - a blueprint to be released Feb. 2 that will be constrained by record deficits expected to approach $500 billion this year.

Even as Democrats scrapped among themselves over who would oppose him in November, the president touted his administration's successes: the toppling and capture of Saddam Hussein, the revival of economic growth, and the passage of major tax cuts and a Medicare prescription drug benefit.

"America this evening is a nation called to great responsibilities," Bush said in his 54-minute address Tuesday evening. "And we are rising to meet them."

The address contained few major new proposals, underlining the limitations of a budget burdened by deficits and a campaign year in which far-reaching legislative accomplishments probably will be hard to come by.

From Congress to the presidential campaign trail in New Hampshire, where next week's presidential primary will be held, Democrats balked. They said Bush had ignored the job losses, ballooning budget deficits, diplomatic reversals and growing ranks of Americans without health insurance that have characterized his administration.

"He promised us a humble foreign policy. Instead, he's alienated our allies, lost the respect of the world community, and cost 500 brave young men and women their lives" in Iraq, said retired Gen. Wesley Clark.

"President Bush's speech was not so much of a State of the Union as a state of his re-election campaign," said Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y. "But the president's words do not change the reality that his priorities are out of touch with the priorities of most Americans."

Bush touted a cluster of issues sure to energize conservative voters who are the core of the Republican Party.

He said he would support a constitutional amendment defining marriage as being between a man and a woman if courts struck down a law mandating that. He asked lawmakers to renew expiring portions of the USA Patriot Act that strengthen the investigative reach of law enforcement agencies, double funds for abstinence education and codify his administration's award of federal grants to religious charities.

He also took a swipe at Democrats who have challenged the path he took in Iraq, who have said his tax cuts were an unnecessary boon to the rich and that his Medicare expansion and education initiatives were inadequate.

He said the nation needed to stay the course against terrorism and admonished those who would "turn back to the dangerous illusion that terrorists are not plotting and outlaw regimes are no threat to us."

"We have not come all this way - through tragedy and trial and war - only to falter and leave our work unfinished," the president said.

Democrats, however, saw Bush and his policies as entirely dispensable - and employed rhetoric aimed at their own supporters.

"The State of the Union may look rosy from the White House balcony or the suites of George Bush's wealthiest donors, but hardworking Americans will see through this president's effort to wrap his radical agenda with a compassionate ribbon," said former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, another of the Democratic presidential hopefuls.

"This president still doesn't understand what's happening in living rooms across this country," said another White House contender, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. "He doesn't see what's happening in our economy, in the workplace and to families everywhere."

By far, the most expensive proposal in his speech was one he has made repeatedly: Making his already enacted cuts in personal income and other taxes permanent. That has a price tag estimated at $2 trillion, and an uncertain fate in Congress, considering projections for year after year of huge budget deficits.

Bush also called for more money - likely to be relatively small amounts - for spreading democratic institutions abroad, helping students performing poorly in math in reading, training prisoners for future employment and testing for drugs in schools.

He proposed tax breaks to help low-income people afford health care, and renewed his call to let people divert part of their Social Security taxes into retirement accounts whose investment they would control.

Congress is unlikely to touch an overhaul of politically sensitive Social Security at least until next year, after the elections.

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