Slate Magazine - Ballot Box

Okay, now what in Iraq?

John Dickerson — Wed, 8 Nov 2006 17:38:24 EST

Okay, now what in Iraq?

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Bush to geezers: Save yourselves!

Chris Suellentrop — Thu, 3 Feb 2005 00:32:32 EST

In his State of the Union address, President Bush claimed, for the first time during his presidency, to be asking Americans to sacrifice. The man who told the country, and the government, that the patriotic way to respond to 9/11 was to spend lots of money now says he wants the nation to be more penurious. Think of the children, Bush said, "on issue after issue," but especially with regard to Social Security. The president painted his plan to alter the Social Security system as a grand bargain in which the current generation of older Americans, like parents saving for their children's college tuition, would forgo some small benefit so that the next generation could reap huge rewards.

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At an inaugural ball, freedom from the press.

Chris Suellentrop — Thu, 20 Jan 2005 23:23:29 EST

"I feel like I'm in the penalty box," complains Cesar Soriano, a reporter for USA Today, from his perch at the back of the ballroom at the Washington Hilton. Soriano and the rest of the press have been cordoned into a restricted area, maybe 50 feet wide and 20 feet deep, at the Constitution Ball, the first of nine inaugural balls that the president and first lady will visit Thursday night. Soriano says he's covered several inaugurations, and this is the first ball where his movement has been restricted. "I had to be escorted to take a leak," he says. "So, while I was there, I interviewed a guy." The escort "was probably wondering what took me so long." Once the president leaves (and he hasn't even arrived yet), Soriano and his compatriots will be liberated from their chains, but until then we're stuck in the Constitution Ball's internment camp.

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Great speech. But what did it mean?

Chris Suellentrop — Thu, 20 Jan 2005 16:55:49 EST

Perhaps no politician since Lincoln has been better at linking the language of the Bible with the language of democracy, America's secular religion, than George W. Bush. In President Bush's second inaugural address, freedom, like God, comes calling in the night. It comes "to every mind and every soul," Bush said, and it "will come to those who love it." If freedom has left you, have no fear, for there will be a Second Coming, Bush assured, a day when freedom rules the earth. "We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom," he said. "We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul." In Bush's telling, freedom is "a fire in the minds of men," an allusion to the "revolutionary faiths" that powered the French and Russian revolutions. "It warms those who feel its power, it burns those who fight its progress, and one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of the world." Bush made freedom sound like God's call, a spiritual force that must be heard and answered willingly but that comes to all who have ears. Freedom must be chosen, Bush said, but it is inescapable that some day all will choose it.

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Bush's pre-inaugural address.

Chris Suellentrop — Wed, 19 Jan 2005 21:41:23 EST

Most people have forgotten, but four years ago George W. Bush delivered one of the best-received inaugural addresses in a half-century. In Slate, Jacob Weisberg judged Bush's first inaugural "the best since Reagan's first in 1980, and perhaps since John F. Kennedy's 'ask not' message of 1961." The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg went further, calling the speech "better than all but a tiny handful of all the inaugurals of all the presidents since the republic was founded." As President Bush prepares to deliver his second, you'd think he would have acquired by now a reputation as a first-rate orator.

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