Conservative War on Poverty?

Well, the choreography was pretty impressive.

Bush, walking to the microphone, flanked by a floodlit cathedral and a statue of a Andrew Jackson on horseback. Wearing an open-collar blue shirt with rolled-up sleeves to symbolize his new role in the trenches. Giving out an 877 number. The night air seemed to loosen him up, making him less stiff than in his usual coat-and-tie Oval Office address.

The president was all about optimism for the future--and he only glancingly alluded to why the federal cavalry arrived so pathetically late. This was a night to hand out federal goodies (no mention of the budgetary impact or whether his generic call for sacrifice might include sacrificing any other programs, such as abolition of the estate tax for the ultra-rich).

Bush did devote a couple of sentences to talk about the problems of poverty and racial discrimination, two subjects he rarely addresses. But he quickly let that drop. He proposed a low-tax Gulf Opportunity Zone--but why has he never submitted such a plan for other blighted urban areas?

Still, last night's speech was not about programmatic details so much as projecting an image of compassionate leadership.

Four years after 9/11, Bush said, Americans have the right to expect a better disaster response. Ab-so-lutely! But what has the homeland security bureaucracy been doing since then? Bush named no one to head this biggest-reconstruction-in-history job. He said he'd cooperate with a congressional inquiry--controlled by Republicans--but made no mention of calls for an independent commission.

The pundits were restrained. Tim Russert said no one speech would solve Bush's political problems. Howard Fineman said the speech lacked urgency. Mort Kondracke said Bush was calling for a conservative War on Poverty, using tax credits and incentives like worker accounts and urban homesteading. Former GOP House member Joe Scarborough said FDR could have given the address-- it was "the WPA on steroids"-- and Tucker Carlson said the truth is that Bush is a big spender.

Something tells me that Bush's fortunes would have looked very different had he given such a speech on Day Five of the crisis, not three weeks later. Here's the morning analysis:

Michael Tackett in the Chicago Tribune : "President Bush, who often refers to "that crowd in Washington" with near derision, found himself performing an act of political contortion Thursday night.

"Government was no longer the problem. Government was now the solution. Federal spending was not to be curtailed. Record federal spending would have his full backing. Deferring to the judgment of governors and states simply would not do. The job of rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina was one that only the federal government could properly oversee.

"Throughout his nationally broadcast address from a shattered New Orleans, it was as though the disaster of Hurricane Katrina had transformed the president from the logical heir to Ronald Reagan to some curious amalgam of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson."

Joanna Weiss in the Boston Globe : "Now, 'Brownie' is gone and the White House has realized, some two weeks into the crisis, that contrition is in order. So Bush read uncomfortably from his Teleprompter last night, without any sign of swagger. It wasn't a portrait of sympathy; Bush doesn't do pain-sharing, the way Bill Clinton did so glibly and so often. This was president as general contractor. It was president as telethon chairman, repeating a 1-800 number."