Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

President Bush

WASHINGTON -- President Bush's plan for a second term became much clearer Wednesday night: Roosevelt, in reverse.

He offered a dramatic change in course for the country's most venerated domestic policy and urged staying the course in a foreign policy that has set him apart from all his modern-era predecessors.

Though his State of the Union address had few memorable phrases, the president, who shuns intellectualism, offered up a full helping of big ideas. How those ideas play out in the next four years will go a long way toward determining whether Bush can create the equivalent of a Franklin D. Roosevelt legacy for Republicans in terms of sustained national majorities for his party.

Roosevelt proposed Social Security with the government as the guarantor of a safety net for the elderly, an idea that has been central to the
New Deal creed that Democrats have hewed to since. Bush said he wanted to fundamentally alter it for younger workers, relying on the upward forces of financial markets to provide returns that the government never could. If young voters embrace the idea, then they might also embrace the GOP for years to come.

What Bush didn't mention was that he was also proposing a fundamental shift in risk from government to the individual.

In foreign policy, by imploring the country and Congress to stand firm
in Iraq and to resist any call for a precise deadline for troop withdrawal, the president sought validation for an approach that was the
opposite of FDR's alliance-building during World War II. Both presidents made tyranny a villain and freedom the noble principle worth dying for, but they arrived at that place in very different ways. Bush's case was certainly made stronger by the widely praised Iraqi elections Sunday.

Bush said the United States would "continue to build" the coalitions to defeat dangers but gave little idea of how he would persuade those
nations that rejected the invasion of Iraq, including strong allies.

With Republicans in control of Congress and the White House, Bush is now in a position unlike perhaps any president since Roosevelt (or perhaps Lyndon Johnson in 1965) to bring others to his view on government's role
in people's lives. It promises a great struggle between conservatism and
liberalism.

Full-throttle conservatism

And Bush's was a full-bodied conservatism, with appeals to economic conservatives and social ones, with a call for tax cuts, a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage and strict constructionist
federal judges.

Democrats showed their initial response in the notable form of silence.
Bush's plan for Social Security was met with the sound of one side of
the aisle clapping. So far, however, Democrats have offered more argument than alternative. And for the president, like a lawyer who
writes the first draft of a document, that could be a distinct advantage.

That said, Bush is also gambling that he can win the fight for many of his policies on the backs of Republican votes alone. Compromise, so far, has not been a hallmark of the Bush presidency. Instead, as he did with Social Security, he often makes a call for compromise, then sets out a
list of his conditions that must be met.

Unlike President Ronald Reagan, Bush did not make government out as the enemy. And, to be sure, Bush has at times expanded the size of
government, largely because of the creation of the Homeland Security Department after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He also
supported adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare. (He had little to say about how he might deal with a coming crisis in that program due to the surge in health-care costs.)

But, more broadly, his notion of an "ownership society" that so infuses his domestic agenda is predicated on the idea that the private sector
and forces of the market are ultimately preferable to the hand of government.

It is clearly a pitch that has found voice among a strong segment of the
electorate, but the challenge for the president will be whether it will invite a strong backlash.

This president has shown that he is anything but timid in his proposals just as he had no problem claiming that the November election conferred
upon him a mandate notwithstanding that a shift of about 60,000 votes in
Ohio would have cost him a second term.

For the moment, the Democrats have decided to aggressively attack the president's agenda. That has not stopped Bush in the past, and his
Republican majorities in Congress have only increased since he last made a large-scale proposal.

Danger of defectors

Indeed, the trick for the president will not be in winning converts so much as it will be in retaining the already converted.

"To the extent to which they [congressional Republicans] think that their interests diverge electorally, they are willing to go against the
president," said David Lewis, a professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton.

"I think that Bush is a real good politician and I think he knows he's got about 12 to 18 months and then it's over," said Rep. Ray LaHood(R-Ill.). "He realizes now if he doesn't get Social Security and maybe immigration early, then it's not going to happen. A year from now everybody is going to be talking about who's running for president."

The tension for Bush is between aiming high and not overreaching. So far, though shaky at times, he has found balance.