Students gathered around television sets across campus last night to observe President Bush's fifth State of the Union Address, and his first major speech since the inauguration. Speaking for just over an hour, the president described the Union as “confident and strong,” and he laid out an ambitious plan for his next four years in office.
“I thought he had a nice balance between the domestic issues and the international and foreign issues,” freshman Jeremy Vryhof commented.
To keep America's economy strong, the president pledged to check government spending.
“America's prosperity requires restraining the spending appetite of the federal government,” he said. “My budget substantially reduces or eliminates more than 150 government programs that are not getting results, or duplicate efforts, or do not fulfill essential priorities.”
For the first forty minutes of the speech, Bush described his domestic agenda, mentioning his plans for a simplified tax code, challenging Congress to pass legislation allowing the U.S. to reduce its dependence on foreign oil, and calling for a new immigration policy with ambitious goals but few details about how those goals will be realized. He stressed major social security reform through voluntary personal retirement accounts.
The president also revisited the issue of the sanctity of marriage and warned against activist judicial rulings: “ For the good of families, children, and society, I support a constitutional amendment to support the institution of marriage,” he said.
Vryhof appreciated the president's challenge: “That's something that you can't ever hear enough of, especially in this day and age. It would be nice if he could get some support for his appointments from the Democrats in the Senate,” he said.
Late in his speech, Bush described the progress in Iraq.
“We will succeed because the Iraqi people value their own liberty – as they showed the world last Sunday,” he said. In response, several Iraqi guests held their purple-stained index fingers aloft, as evidence that they were indeed grateful for the opportunity to vote in the first democratic Iraqi elections in years.
“We will not set an artificial timetable for leaving Iraq, because that would embolden the terrorists, and make them believe they can wait us out,” he also said.
After seeing the president's introduction of a slain Marine's parents, Vanderput remarked, “The embrace between the Iraqi woman and the slain Marine's mother told me that everything we're doing in Iraq is worth it.”