Talk about surprises.<\/p>\n
Tonight George W. Bush delivers his final State of the Union address under astonishing circumstances. \u00a0Last January, almost unanimously, the smart money prophesized that 2007 would mark the President\u2019s effective demise. \u00a0His party had just lost control of both houses of Congress. \u00a0Iraq looked like an irretrievable disaster. \u00a0Mr. Bush\u2019s popularity was approaching depths to which few presidents had ever gone before. \u00a0His presidency was all but over, the savants were sure.<\/p>\n
They could not have been more wrong.<\/p>\n
Instead of finding himself out of cards by now, the President goes into tonight\u2019s address holding an amazingly strong hand.<\/p>\n
The success of the surge in Iraq is a big part of why. \u00a0The President shoved all his chips in on the strategy and his bet paid off \u2013 far more than anyone, probably including himself, expected. \u00a0He did it against the united resistance of Congress\u2019 newly installed leadership, all of whom wanted to force upon him a timetable for bringing the troops home. And he did it despite polling numbers that would have had his immediate predecessor racing to bomb an empty aspirin factory and clear out.<\/p>\n
As Fred Barnes has detailed in the current Weekly Standard<\/span>, in the early days of consideration, the surge faced the skepticism even of most senior uniformed officers. \u00a0Yet the President listened to these officers and adjusted. \u00a0Then he cajoled and convinced. \u00a0Soon he had developed a consensus in the military around his strategy. \u00a0Where he felt he had to replace officers, he made sure none was humiliated. \u00a0All departed command with honor. \u00a0This is leadership of the highest order, and its success had a lot to do with the president\u2019s parallel 2007 success in the Congress.<\/p>\n When they took over Congress, the Democrats announced they would paralyze the Administration with investigations, even as they forced on the President a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. \u00a0But as the President\u2019s new Iraqi policies started to work, this scorched earth approach became less and less acceptable to the public. Congress\u2019 popularity sank below the President\u2019s. \u00a0Before long Mr. Bush found himself able to stop most Congressional actions he wanted to stop and win most legislative battles he decided to fight. \u00a0Achieved despite his own low poll numbers, it was a dazzling performance.<\/p>\n It has been capped off in the last few weeks with the forging of a consensus around the Administration\u2019s stimulus program. \u00a0The subprime crisis is just the latest in a series of potential economic catastrophes that have pounced without warning on the country during the Bush presidency. \u00a0From the bursting of the late Clinton-era tech bubble just as Mr. Bush took office, to Enron and related financial scandals rooted in the excesses of the prior decade, to one of the worst natural disasters in American history hitting an area governed by the least competent city-state government pairing in the nation, to the current crisis, the Bush Administration has had to confront an unprecedented series of economic surprises.<\/p>\n The President\u2019s current economic team is undoubtedly his best. They have approached the current market turmoil with remarkable steadiness. \u00a0Perhaps in part for that reason, they have managed to change the talk in Congress from confrontation to compromise \u2013 with passage of the Administration\u2019s stimulus plan looking assured.<\/p>\n So as he steps into the well of the House of Representatives tonight, the President will represent what the American people have been telling pollsters for some time that they most want \u2013 a leader who doesn\u2019t look at the polls but at the national interest, who acts accordingly with strength and confidence and, again and again in the past year, whose judgment has been vindicated.<\/p>\n With this record, he has a chance at an even stronger 2008 \u2013- with tonight\u2019s speech kicking things off.<\/p>\n A year ago, who would have guessed it possible?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Talk about surprises. Tonight George W. Bush delivers his final State of the Union address under astonishing circumstances. \u00a0Last January, almost unanimously, the smart money prophesized that 2007 would mark the President\u2019s effective demise. \u00a0His party had just lost control of both houses of Congress. \u00a0Iraq looked like an irretrievable disaster. \u00a0Mr. Bush\u2019s popularity was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[12],"class_list":["post-19","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political-commentary-general","tag-hugh-hewitt"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":607,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions\/607"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}