STATE OF THE UNION: BUSINESS AS USUAL
The theater of the State of the Union address required that the trial of the man delivering it be unsaid, and unseen. And, except for a few tiny details-notable efforts by the president not to jab his finger, a touch of excess in the ovation for the First Lady-it was. Chaliapin was performing the night the Winter Palace fell; Bill Clinton performed in the room where, a month earlier, he had been impeached.

It was a typical Clinton State of the Union address: well-delivered moment by moment; shapeless and boring overall. He continued the bad tradition of presenting heroes in the galleries as if they were homegrown sweet-potato plants in show-and-tell. He touched on a blizzard of topics, from redwoods to Kosovo. Some were minutiae with a rightish tinge (no "social promotion" in schools). Some were baby-boomer bait (tax credits to take care of old people). Some were meat for the Left (global warming, hate-crimes legislation).

Clinton recommended that 60 percent of the budget surplus be spent to "save Social Security," which means that he will neither back significant tax cuts nor support truly saving Social Security by privatizing it. (His "USA Accounts," however, are worth considering. They would encourage people to save for their own retirement, at least a step toward giving them greater control over their own financial security through the private investment of their Social Security taxes.) Similarly, the president's checklist of education programs means no help from him either for vouchers or for meaningful public-school standards.

Such passages captured Clinton in a favorite mood: wonkishly enthusiastic, firing an arsenal of small-bore weapons. This aspect of his politics is commonly associated with the poll-testing of Dick Morris, but this is unfair in two ways. Clinton's own instincts carry him in this direction; and they are not only his instincts-they are the time's. How would the speech have differed, in anything but detail, if the Newt Gingrich of 1994 had delivered it? There would have been the same bland hopefulness, the same parade of idea-lets (Newt might have held up a microchip).

This is the deeper, and more damaging, sense in which the speech represented business as usual. Questions of America's national character-including quotas, language, and immigration-lie untouched by both parties at a time when a rhetoric of imprecise globalism is in the air. When the business cycle has its inevitable downturn, this very globalism-particularly "global capitalism"-could be a scapegoat right and left. A renewed sense of national identity and purpose is the best antidote. But no one in Washington is looking for it.