Post-Inaugural Thoughts

Most Inaugural Addresses are forgotten and eminently forgettable. Only time will tell if President Bush's second address is long-remembered.

But if the President is in earnest about the foreign policy declarations he made today, it represents, at the very least, a major departure from conventional Republican approaches. Historically, Republicans have fallen into the realist category pioneered by George Washington and most magnificently exemplified by Dwight Eisenhower.

The stance enunciated by Mr. Bush today represents the most robust form of Wilsonian foreign policy imaginable. As such, his remarks are more in the tradition of Democrats like Johnson, Truman, and Kennedy than of Republicans like Theodore Roosevelt, Reagan, Nixon, or Bush the Elder.

As the years unfold, several things will be interesting to observe:

1. Whether the President intends to pursue this policy evenhandedly or selectively. For example, will the US government walk hand-in-hand with dissidents in China or Russia? The President's rhetoric today would seem to indicate that he will.

2. Whether the President intends to push other wars of pre-emption, most notably against Iran and North Korea.

3. Given the President's robust intentions, whether Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld will make changes in his approach to configuring America's military. Rumsfeld, as you know, advocates a smaller force which is more technologically-dependent. Under the policy the President enunciated today, will US military obligations become more far-flung?

As to domestic policy, the President forcefully declared his intention to reform Social Security.

Whatever one's feelings about his policies or his November win, there should be no doubt about Mr. Bush's mandate. He did, after all, win the election and did so with a majority of votes.

The complaint that the President has only appointed people who agree with him to his second-term cabinet strike me as silly. (They have been echoed again today by some.) Elections are supposed to be about something. Presidents are elected with the expectation that they will pursue certain policies. It's absurd to think that once elected, they should only appoint people who disagree with them and will thereby thwart their policy initiatives.

Whether the President possesses the mandate to universalize the policy he is pursuing in Iraq is another question, one that both the nation and the Congress will answer one way or another in the next few years.