President Bush's Final State of the Union Address

Democrats started the day by declaring they were happy this was the last of President Bush's State of the Union Address. Nonetheless, Bush was expected to call for spending cuts and insist on cooperation from Congress.

Nancy Pelosi is reported to have dismissed this State of the Union address as trivial and backward looking. Bush is a lame duck president, but pundits believe he wants to remain a player as long as he is in office. Other pundits believed that Bush would use this Sate of the Union Address to try and regain his credentials as both a fiscal and compassionate conservative.

What Bush delivered was a quasi-conservative address. He was clearly conservative on maintaining tax cuts and cutting pork barrel spending. He declared that he would override any bill that increased taxes in any way. However, he dangled a leg over the fence when he asked for expanded spending of his own to retrain workers whose jobs have been shipped overseas.

At least he didn't blow the same pipe dream that Romney proposed to bring the jobs back, an unrealistic statement that should never have been made in Michigan.

Bush was weak when it came to speaking about our economy. There is a general consensus among many Americans that the economy is already in trouble. Bush, instead, labeled this a "period of uncertainty." That is an understatement when food and gas prices are at an all time high. He said wages were up. My only response to that is, "Not in my neighborhood."

After commenting that he and Nancy Pelossi worked together on an economic incentive plan, Bush admonished Congress not to load the economic package with nonsense and bog it down. He said that would "only delay it or derail it, "causing further economic distress to the American public.

Bush was adamant that he wanted to make tax relief permanent, to which the Republican side of the aisle rose and applauded, while the Democrats sat unaffected. The democrats have no interest in maintaining Bush's tax cuts.