Washington -- President Bush delivers his State of the Union address tonight to a Congress in turmoil, rocked by allegations of corruption and uncertainty over who will be in charge after election day.
Bush's own approval rating has fallen dramatically, following the worst year of his presidency, and his Democratic opponents are more emboldened than at any point during his tenure.
The political landscape is hardly recognizable from a year ago, when the Republican president began his second term with the largest Republican majority in half a century and called for overhauling Social Security, confronting illegal immigration, and restructuring the nation's tax code.
The extraordinary turnabout has prompted some to compare tonight's address before a joint session of Congress to the one delivered by Democratic President Bill Clinton on Jan. 27, 1998, just six days after the Monica Lewinsky story became public, when observers wondered if there was anything he could say to salvage his political future.
Though Bush's situation hardly appears as bleak as Clinton's, who signaled his perseverance by simply ignoring the Lewinsky matter that evening, observers from both parties will be looking for clues tonight about how Bush plans to regain control of his agenda for the remaining three years of his presidency.
"There are times when we gauge a president, his tone, his confidence, whether he is going to be able to rebound and carry through on how he handles himself in a State of the Union address,'' said Norman Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.
Bush addresses the nation as polls show barely 4 in 10 Americans approve of the job he is doing, the worst standing of any president at the start of their sixth year with the exception of Richard Nixon, who would resign later that year over the Watergate scandal. Though Republicans now hold majorities in both houses of Congress, their grip on power is threatened, and the most sweeping initiatives proposed by Bush last year did not even come to votes.
"President Bush right now is in a very serious case of second-term blues. It may be the avian flu of second-term blues,'' Ornstein said.
The value placed on the State of the Union speech seems to grow each year, as the White House tries to capitalize on the huge prime-time audience, and the news media cooperate by hyping the stakes.
Oh poppycock! The SOTU is a waste of time, unless one wants to keep score of the lies in each one, from one year to the next.
Bush is not in a lather about the SOTU: he is not running for anything. The Rethugs should be in a lather over it, but they won't be, because they have no clue what is coming for them.
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