Editorial for January 31, 2008 edition:


State of delusion

Northeast Philadelphia has its fair share of independent voters who treat ticket splitting — that is, voting for Republicans and Democrats in general elections and not just one party or the other — as not just a right but an obligation. Many of these citizens, including Republicans, no doubt were breathing a sigh of relief Monday night while George W. Bush was delivering his final State of the Union speech.
Mr. Bush’s address, like all State of the Union speeches, was filled with far too much polite but insincere applause, but this one was much ado about nothing. It was essentially a Seinfeld speech — a speech about nothing.
The nation’s uniter-in-chief squandered a golden opportunity to use the limelight to burnish a legacy. Imagine the reaction of the American people had Mr. Bush figuratively thumbed his nose at right-wing extremists in the Republican Party — as a lame duck, he no longer is beholden to them to help him win razor-thin elections — by promising to stop vetoing bills that would and should expand children’s health insurance (S-CHIP) and allow the sky to be the limit in using stem-cell research that could someday cure diseases.
Imagine if he had demonstrated true concern about a problem that’s turning his pals in the oil industry into zillionaires but is hurting most of the people in the real world — gasoline prices. Imagine if he had used the State of the Union address to call for a 50 percent windfall-profits tax on Big Oil, retroactive to 2001, to help finance the economic stimulus package or mortgage assistance. Imagine if the stubborn cowboy from Texas had the chutzpah to apologize for misleading the nation into a war.
Imagine a president who truly gives a damn. ••

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