Bush using address to frame agenda for election

WASHINGTON -- With the economy growing, the stock market rising and Saddam Hussein in custody, President Bush will frame his re-election agenda in an upbeat State of the Union address, arguing he has made America more prosperous and secure but still can do better.

Democrats have a ready answer: Bush has the worst job-creation record of any president since Herbert Hoover and misjudged what would happen in Iraq, where the death toll of U.S. troops reached 500 on Saturday.

Bush will step into the election-year debate Tuesday night with a nationally broadcast speech. It is wedged on the political calendar between Monday night's Iowa caucuses and the leadoff presidential primary in New Hampshire on Jan. 27.

Restricted by record budget deficits that blossomed during his administration and approach $500 billion, Bush has little room to propose costly initiatives.

But he will urge Congress to make recently enacted tax cuts permanent over the next decade and will push for action to deal with the rising cost of health care, White House aides say. He will revive his contentious plan to allow younger workers to invest a portion of their Social Security taxes in the stock market.

Security not in speech

Bush is not expected to use the speech for tough talk on national security. He did that last year in laying out the case for war against Iraq; the year before he branded North Korea, Iran and Iraq an "axis of evil."

"We're fighting three wars simultaneously, in Iraq, Afghanistan and globally against terror," said Richard Haass, a former senior adviser to Secretary of State Colin Powell and now president of the Council on Foreign Relations.

"There's little appetite and little capacity for any new discretionary undertakings, so that places an emphasis on diplomacy vis-a-vis North Korea and Iran," Haass said. "We're simply stretched too thin -- militarily, economically, diplomatically -- to be lighting any fuses."

Bush used his weekly radio address to preview his speech.

"Over the past few years, America has been confronted with great challenges, and the American people have responded with strength and compassion and confidence," he said. "This nation is meeting its priorities, both at home and abroad."

He said the economy grew at its fastest pace in two decades in the third quarter of 2003 and that more than a 250,000 new jobs have been created since August.

Yet the nation still has a net loss of 2.3 million jobs since Bush took office, Democrats said, and the president has failed to make health care more affordable and available for many Americans.

Bush took some of the drama out of his speech by announcing two major initiatives over the past week: an overhaul of the nation's immigration policy and a moon-Mars space exploration goal.

Still, with an audience of millions, the State of the Union is a crucial speech.

More than two months in the making, the speech is being worked over this weekend at Camp David by Bush, chief speech writer Michael Gerson, communications director Dan Bartlett and Karen Hughes, a former White House official and one of Bush's closest advisers who flew in from Texas to help.

"With this speech he wants to set out the agenda for the political year, he wants to defend his policies on which he's taken so much heat -- on Iraq, on the economy -- and he wants to lay out a few new things to spice up the policy agenda so that he's not just sitting back," said Ken Khachigian, a Republican strategist who wrote speeches for Presidents Reagan and Nixon.

White House officials believe the speech offers Bush a chance in prime time to appear presidential and draw a contrast with Democratic rivals who are quarreling among themselves and criticizing Bush.

Leadership will be a prime theme of Bush's campaign.

"The bulliest pulpit of the presidential bully pulpit is the State of the Union because he's got all this media attention," said Princeton University political scientist Fred Greenstein. "He's surrounded by the panoply of ceremony of the chief executive, all the drama of coming in and the cameras training on all the minutiae.

"But I think a high proportion of real people don't pay attention to the thing all the way through or they empty the dish washer while it's on or look for a cable channel that doesn't have political rhetoric on it," Greenstein said.