The War At Home

• Share

In January 1942, Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered his first wartime State of the Union address. Three weeks from now, George W. Bush will do the same. His speechwriters have been looking at Roosevelt's words for inspiration, but the surprise is that, in many ways, F.D.R. may have had the easier task.

Where Roosevelt was worried that Americans feared the war would never end, Bush frets that Americans think the war on terror has already ended. Where Roosevelt called for a national mobilization against mighty villains, Bush must rally the nation against invisible enemies. And while F.D.R. focused solely on the long war ahead, Bush must leverage his newfound stature into domestic achievement. "There's a real sense that we have to come up with some big, new ideas," says a nervous White House official. "We have to show we're not just sitting on our high poll numbers."

With the Taliban vanquished, Bush has to start worrying about political enemies at home. No. 1 on his list: Tom Daschle, the Senate Democratic leader who last week ended the unofficial ban on full-contact politics with a speech that clobbered the President for throwing away the budget surplus on a massive tax cut. Bush's domestic agenda, Daschle charged, "is being written by a wing of the Republican Party that isn't interested in fiscal discipline."

The President's advisers are still debating how aggressively to respond to Daschle. Hard-liners argue that with Bush's approval ratings hovering near 90%, now is the time to push a conservative agenda and dare the Democrats to oppose it. "Unless the President takes on Daschle, we will have paralysis, and voters won't be able to see distinctions," says a House G.O.P. leader. But Bush favors a softer approach: calling for a continuation of post-9/11 unity and bipartisanship, thereby making Daschle seem shrill and churlish. At the same time, Bush knows that his father's apparent blindness to the recession of 1991 negated his Gulf War triumph. So between now and his State of the Union address on Jan. 29, Bush will hold a series of public events designed to prove his empathy for Americans hit hard by the current tough times.

In his big speech, Bush plans to drape his arms around the entire nation, Democrats included. In an upgrade of his "Communities of Character" initiative that was shelved because of the September attacks, Bush will propose a range of volunteer programs aimed at harnessing the reawakened desire of many Americans to serve their community and give to charity. His big idea: to expand the Corporation for National and Community Service, which Bill Clinton created with the youth-service program Americorps.