War to Keynote State of the Union Talk

WASHINGTON —  President Bush will use his State of the Union message Tuesday night to give a “status report to the country” on the progress of the war, his spokesman said today.

Presidential Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said that Bush will also speak about the nation’s faltering economy and outline his domestic priorities but that “the central thrust of the speech will be the Persian Gulf War.”

Although officials earlier suggested that the speech would generally deal equally with both the war and domestic matters, Fitzwater said a discussion of the conflict will take up “more than half” of the 25-minute speech.

The President was spending most of the day at his desk working on the speech that he will deliver at 6 p.m. PST Tuesday to a joint session of Congress.

“It will be a review of the goals and objectives of the conflict, of our work with the coalition, a status report to the country on where we are on the progress of the war,” Fitzwater said.

Bush will put a positive spin on prospects for the war’s conclusion, other officials said. Bush had originally planned to use the annual address to showcase his domestic proposals for the remaining two years of his term.

“When everyone is thinking about the war, you can’t talk about the domestic agenda and expect anyone to listen,” said Stephen Hess, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who specializes in the presidency.

“He’s going to be appropriately positive, confident, about the Middle East and about the economy,” one official said.

“You want the audience, having heard what the President had to say, to come away from that with the clear sense that the man in charge is on top of not only the circumstance in the Persian Gulf but also the domestic circumstances,” another official said.