Swanky Conservative

The President ran in 2000 as a compassionate conservative. He was the Republican variant of Bill Clinton in 1992. Where Clinton’s move to the middle was largely in lip service only, the President seems to have made real advances to Port. Increased non-military spending, spending money on HIV and AIDS research, reforming social security and dealing with illegal immigration by shifting the goalposts and renaming them something other than illegal.

That’s the compassionate side.

That’s the way the President ended his speech tonight, a sort of churchtime “Don’t worry, be happy” take on the American future. Though, for a man who supposedly speaks like a poor Texas hick, he was eloquent in the last five minutes of his speech. This was his best delivered SOTU I’ve seen. Not the best in terms of what was said, though. That would have been one of the last three prior.

The conservative side of the President.

This is the “Dead or Alive,” “I’ve heard you, the nation’s heard you and soon those who did this are gonna hear from all of us,” side of the President. This is the frank-speaking side I wish we’d see more of on domestic issues. We get to send Ambassador Bolton to the United Nations so they can hear someone speaking frankly. We get to tell the world that Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon and that the March of Freedom must go on.

We need this side of the President here at home, too. The one that will tell the people the Federal government is not responsible for all parts of our daily lives. That “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”

Because along with the powers returning to the people (or the states), the dollars will return too.

More: The Pajamas Media roundup on the SOTU blogging is here.