HOW does President Bush’s second inaugural address, meant to be the defining speech of his presidency, look in retrospect? Exactly the way it seemed at the time-a grossly simplistic vision of the universal victory of liberty that created an impossible standard for Bush to meet in his second term.
Inaugural addresses by their nature are soaring rather than programmatic, aspirational rather than concrete. The basic idealism of President Bush’s address is firmly within the mainstream of the American foreign-policy tradition and echoes the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan, especially his 1982 address to members of Parliament at Westminster Palace. Arguing that freedom is “the inalienable and universal right of all human beings,” Reagan expressed his confidence in the “march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history.”
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