Out of Gas

"A businesslike manner and crisp delivery were designed to convey the sense of a man who remains on the job and retains some of the considerable tools of the office even though his presidency has been eclipsed by a fierce race to succeed him -- a race that has been largely unfriendly toward his tenure."

But Page writes that Bush's proposals "were downsized from the big promises he unveiled in previous years and his rhetoric was more pragmatic than soaring. There were no vows this time like the one in 2005 to remake Social Security; instead, he called on members of Congress to come up with a solution to an impending fiscal crunch for the retirement program and Medicare. The 2006 goal of seeking 'the end of tyranny in our world' was out; the task of passing trade deals with Colombia and Panama was in. . . .

"Woven through the speech was Bush's call to 'trust' in the American people -- to 'trust people with their own money' by cutting taxes, to restore 'trust in their government' by curbing earmarks, to 'trust American workers to compete with anyone in the world' by approving trade deals, to 'trust in the creative genius of American researchers and entrepreneurs' to develop new energy sources, to 'trust students to learn if given the opportunity.' He used some version of the word 'trust' 19 times.

"Americans weren't necessarily ready to return the favor, though. A Gallup Poll last September found 27% trusted Bush to do the right thing in Iraq; 35% trusted congressional Democrats; and 28% trusted neither."

Peter Baker writes in The Washington Post: "For a president who has always favored boldness, it amounts to a dramatic shift. . . .

"The full-throttle intensity of the presidential campaign framed Bush's speech and underscored his challenge at this point. The address to Congress came two days after a Democratic primary in South Carolina and just 10 hours before polls were to open in Florida. No president has delivered a State of the Union with the campaign to succeed him so far along.

"'He's totally eclipsed,' said Elaine Kamarck, who was a senior adviser to former vice president Al Gore. 'Nothing he says is going to be important for anything that happens in the next 12 months. The speech is a nonevent.'"

John Dickerson writes for Slate: "Part of the president's goal was to remind Congress and the American people that he's still relevant, but other than the executive orders he promised and the Middle East peace initiative he committed himself to, he didn't do anything in his speech to prove that relevance. He extended no great hand to the opposition, and the laundry list of programs he ticked off--which he knows mostly won't get passed in an election year--look only like an attempt to box in Democrats by raising expectations about what they can achieve."

Jay Carney blogs for Time that "the agenda he outlined had a musty whiff to it; it was so full of hardy perennials, of ideas whose time had come and long since gone, that an observer was left wondering if some speechwriter's assistant mistakenly loaded the wrong text into the teleprompter -- with the unexpected result that Bush delivered the whole thing without ever noticing that the words he spoke had been spoken (by him) before, and were oddly detached from both current events and current attitudes."

Thomas M. DeFrank writes in the New York Daily News: "His handlers have been saying for months that President Bush intends to 'sprint to the finish.' Deep down, even those same true believers know the only honest verb is 'limp.' . . .

"Some Presidents are gone but not forgotten; Bush isn't gone, but in a political sense is already forgotten.

"His approval ratings are roughly half what they were at his first State of the Union address, about one-third of their post-9/11 peak. Republicans love his fund-raising prowess, but most candidates seldom mention him. 'Nobody's paying attention to him anymore,' said a veteran of his 2000 presidential campaign.