By Steven Pearlstein
Wednesday, February 1, 2006

In his State of the Union speech last night, President Bush single-handedly revived the spirit of bipartisanship that has been so sorely lacking in Washington for the past decade, at least in terms of economic policy.

We've known for the past several years that the Democrats have nothing original, credible or even mildly intellectually intriguing to say about trade and immigration, the health care crisis, the energy crisis, the income inequality crisis, the education crisis, the global warming crisis, the looming entitlement crisis and the ballooning federal budget deficit.

But now it's official: the Republicans have nothing original, credible or even mildly intellectually intriguing to say about them, either.

It's unanimous.

Listening to the president's speech, in fact, was a bit like stepping into a time machine.

The we-can-meet-this-challenge rhetoric about energy independence, cars running on alternative energy and ending our addiction to Mideast Oil -- that could have come straight from the mouth of Jimmy Carter. The only thing missing was the sweater.

The bit about cutting the deficit in half while renewing individual tax cuts and the research-and-development tax credit -- that was pure Ronald Reagan. Ditto blaming malpractice suits for rising health care costs.

You have to go back only as far as Bill Clinton to find the last blue ribbon commission on entitlement reform.

And you know you're getting old when you can't even count the number of presidents and would-be presidents who have used that tired old line about how, "with open markets and a level playing field, no one can out-produce or out-compete the American worker." Wasn't that a Hubert Humphrey line?

We saw final confirmation of just how devoid the president was of fresh material when he trotted out the ol' line-item veto. Maybe now that he's packed the Supreme Court with a couple of government men, he thinks he can breathe constitutional life back into that dead policy horse.

But here's what I don't understand:

The American people are hungry -- desperately so -- for some straight talk from a political leader of either party about the economic challenges before them.

They don't expect politicians to have all the answers, and they certainly don't want 10-point programs. But they'd surely appreciate seeing some hint that their leaders had studied the problems thoroughly, weighed the competing interests and charted a course that was clearly independent of the special interests that have seized control of the political process. But in this State of the Union, all they got was easy platitudes and an assurance to every business and industry PAC that their money had been well spent.

In his repeated patriotic references to the sacrifices of America's fighting men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush wasn't shy about tapping into the willingness of Americans to embrace shared sacrifice for a worthy common goal. But in the economic sphere, he continued to serve up the fiction of the free lunch.

And can anyone doubt that Americans would respond to a bit of conservative compassion for those who start out in life with two strikes against them, a frank assessment of the obvious trade-offs of free trade, or a shared sense of outrage at corporate executives who toss aside pension and health care benefits for tens of thousands of retirees and then load themselves up with $100 million golden parachutes? But there was none of that -- in the speech or in the economic and budget program that lies behind it.

I find it interesting that the president could take credit for saving $14 billion through the elimination of more than 140 non-security domestic programs without bothering to mention a dime he could save from the Department of Homeland Security or the Pentagon, which on his watch have become cesspools of waste, fraud and fiscal abuse.

And does anyone really believe that a president and vice president who became wealthy from their association with the oil and gas industry, who never failed to tout the industry line and who presided over the biggest transfer of wealth from consumers to industry in the history of mankind -- that these same leaders will move us beyond a "petroleum-based economy" to one based on "wood chips, stalks or switch grass"?

Earlier yesterday, I was anticipating the speech with Regina Herzlinger, a professor at the Harvard Business School who did some of the early work on consumer-driven health care, which is at the heart of the health care initiative the president barely mentioned last night. You'd be hard-pressed to find someone more market-oriented. Yet here she was complaining of how timid the Bush program was in the face of a health care crisis that leaves one quarter of working Americans without health coverage, that wastes hundreds of billions of dollars every year and threatens the competitiveness of U.S. companies in global markets.

"He's in his last term. He's got this great opportunity to do something bold about something that's really important," Herzlinger said. "And look what we get. . . . What the heck has he got to lose?"

Nothing, it would seem, except Republican control of Congress.

Steven Pearlstein will host a web discussion today at 11 a.m. at washingtonpost.com. He can be reached atpearlsteins@washpost.com.