Bush offers stark choice to voters

By Justin Webb BBC Washington correspondent

George Bush kicked off his election campaign with his third State of the Union address by offering the American people a stark choice.

President Bush forcefully defended the war in Iraq

The spoken message was that a vote for George Bush is a vote for continued progress in safety and prosperity, but supporting an opponent would be a vote for outdated policies that would make America less safe.

The unspoken message was that if voters ditch him as a wartime leader they run the risk of disaster befalling the nation.

The speech was his major step to frame the debate and tell voters why they should stay the course.

In defence of war

He opened with a defence of his performance in keeping the US safe, in confronting terrorist threats and in invading Iraq.

If you think back a year to the State of the Union speech, weapons of mass destruction and their certain presence in Iraq was a main feature of that speech as the US began the march to war.

But over the course of the year, the certainty has softened.

The war in Iraq will be a deciding issue in the election

Weapons became weapons programmes and now in this speech he referred to "weapon of mass destruction programme activities".

There is a vagueness there which is fascinating, but he was not in any way apologising for what he had done.

He made the pitch to the American people that a bad man, Saddam Hussein, has gone, and that is a very good thing.

That is a very potent argument for the American people, and if Democrats want to focus on weapons of mass destruction, they might not find much traction there.

Good economic news

The Democrats have also attacked the president on the economy, and it is interesting that the president chose to make a lot of the recent upturn in the American economy.

He feels that he has a success story to tell the nation, and that is a success story that his father didn't have or, at least, was not very good in getting across.

They are not going to make the same mistake in this White House.

There is this sense that there is something good to say about the economy now, and the president will be trumpeting the good news again and again.

He will not allow the Democrats to get the lead on that issue.

What he didn't mention was his recently trumpeted ideas for further manned exploration of outer space.

In election year, if an idea doesn't fly with the focus groups, it doesn't fly - and it appears that the lukewarm response to last week's space ideas might have killed them.

Excess baggage is being jettisoned from this White House as it blasts off towards re-election.

Political calculation

The State of the Union sets out the president's agenda, but in an election year, it does more than that.

This is an intensely political White House that has always been very interested in the issue of re-election.

Signs of growth:
State of the US economy

At-a-glance

There was no exception to that in this speech.

The timing came very close to Democrat's first test in the Iowa caucuses, and this speech was effectively a bid for re-election.

In November, Americans will vote on two issues: Whether Iraq was a disaster and whether the economy is on the mend.

If Iraq is not a disaster and the economy is on the mend, President Bush will be re-elected, and this speech won't make much difference one way or another.

But if there is some sort of disaster in Iraq or the economy clearly hasn't got better and more jobs aren't created, no amount of rhetoric will save this president.

This is after all a 50-50 nation, split down the middle. It won't take much to tip the election one way or the other.