President will lay out four themes

President Bush’s last State of the Union address next week will feature four big themes: fixing the economy, renewal of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), recent successes in Iraq and ratification of trade agreements.

Political insiders say those priorities will allow Bush to focus on areas where he’s been able to forge bipartisan agreement or else gain a significant advantage over the Democratic-led Congress.

{mosads}“His forward-looking proposals should be doable and bipartisan,” said House Republican Conference Chairman Adam Putnam (Fla.). “A limited number of bipartisan proposals will be achievable — first and foremost the economy.”

Bush’s speech on Monday will have a different feel than his previous State of the Union addresses, as he will temporarily wrest the spotlight from the presidential candidates — even though his successor may be in the audience. The mood in the House chamber is unlikely to be warm and nostalgic; Bush will address a Congress he’s bullied, beguiled and bedeviled.  The president promised to be a uniter, though he has acknowledged he was unable to fulfill that campaign pledge from 2000.

However, it is likely that reflections on the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks will be in the address, as well as the ongoing bipartisan efforts to stimulate the economy.

Highlighting the economy poses risks, even if they’re unavoidable. By making it prominent, Bush will take more blame if the stimulus package fails, making it all the worse if he leaves office amid a recession. In last year’s address, he touted the nation’s economy by pointing to statistics on unemployment, inflation and wages and said, “This economy is on the move.”

On Iraq, he will be addressing a chamber deeply split on whether the positive news reports that have emanated from Iraq recently are the result of a changing tide or a temporary respite in a misguided mission.

“He deserves a victory lap on that one,” Putnam said. “He’s earned the right to talk about success in Iraq, both militarily and politically.”

But Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said victory is hardly the word to be using in the fifth year of a war with no end in sight.

“There’s no victory when you’ve lost 4,000 lives and put us in the middle of a civil war,” Emanuel said. “There’s only victory when Iraq is stabilized.”

On FISA, Vice President Cheney previewed the administration’s theme Wednesday, pushing for the temporary intelligence law Congress passed under pressure in August to be made permanent and demanding retroactive lawsuit immunity for telecom companies that participated in the administration’s surveillance program after the 2001 terror attacks.

Bush has three trade agreements he would like to conclude — Colombia, Panama and South Korea. The central fight will be over Colombia. Bush positions it as a way to help a key ally against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. But labor groups don’t want to reward a country that has a long history of labor leaders being murdered, and they’re pushing Democrats to oppose the deal.

Last year, though, Bush made a deal with Democrats to approve a trade agreement with Peru. And business groups are likely to lobby hard for passage of the Colombia deal.

Adding such bipartisan themes to a long list of his accomplishments would allow Bush to forgo his habit of tossing out policy proposals that failed to pass even when Congress was controlled by Republicans.

For example, last year, he was still insisting that, “With enough good sense and good will, you and I can fix Medicare and Medicaid and save Social Security.” But with the new Democratic majority there was little good will for Bush in the chamber and no sense that his entitlement changes had any chance of passing.

And if stimulus negotiations are going well, he might not get the eye-rolls that accompanied his assertion last year that “we can work through our differences and achieve big things for the American people,” a notion that became more unrealistic with every partisan battle of the year.

Bush in 2007 asked Congress to “build on the success” of his signature No Child Left Behind education initiative. He got polite applause in the chamber, but no action from Democrats who found funding of the program insufficient or from Republicans who didn’t like the demands placed on local school boards.

Bush also called on Congress last year to pass immigration reform, but that bill died in the Senate as it bitterly split the GOP.

Conservatives have been pushing Bush to finally fire some shots in the rhetorical war he’s been waging on earmarks in many of his annual addresses. They say he could refuse to enforce the thousands of earmarks that are effected in “report language” and not actually passed by Congress. But administration officials have signaled in recent news accounts that they won’t take up such a fight for fear of alienating Congress on other issues, like the economy.