Brian Greenspun wonders why it took the president six years to think about health care, global warming

Sunday, Jan. 28, 2007 | 7:29 a.m.

The state of our union is - in a confused state.

The pundit class has spent this past week picking apart or propping up President Bush's State of the Union address. The result of the past few days' effort to sell whatever it was that the president tried so hard to sell is that not much has changed in the public's mind. The people are still convinced that Iraq is a mistake and that more troops - unless they number in the hundreds of thousands - will do nothing to change the outcome.

Since I don't believe in piling on - at least not unless it will do some good - I will confine my critique to what I had hoped President Bush had said. I wish he had said much of his speech six years ago when he could have led the Congress and this country toward some significant improvement.

Whatever you may think of his modest proposals regarding health care and global warming, at least they were proposals, something to debate and something to build upon. The question is why did it take six years to get them from one end of Pennsylvania Avenue to the other?

As for his effort to resell his Iraq war to a country not interested any longer in buying, the results are pouring in. And they are being counted in the numbers of Republican leaders who are pulling away from or pushing against the president's plan.

He may not have realized it when he said it the other night, but the president summed up the way the people of this country feel about his Iraq war and most of everything else he has done during the past six years.

Whatever you voted for, he told America, you did not vote for this. Amen.

So, enough about our president. What about Fidel Castro? Remember him?

He's the guy who took over Cuba more than 45 years ago and, since then, has been a pain in our side. A giant pain, in fact, in part because he has controlled what has been a communist country just 90 miles from the shores of the greatest democracy on the planet. That doesn't look good to the rest of the world, which used to think we controlled our own little hemisphere. He also has been a giant pain in part because the politics of South Florida has been dictated by its huge Cuban-American population hellbent on punishing any politician who even thought about talking to Fidel over the past five decades.

All that may be over - maybe. It is pretty clear that Fidel's younger brother, Raoul, has consolidated power and now runs Cuba. It is also pretty clear that Raoul would like to make nice-nice with the United States. He has a few problems to overcome - such as a $2 billion dependency on Venezuela, which would look unkindly toward a rapprochement with the U.S., and a still-pretty-solid anti-Castro sentiment in Florida that plays hell with Republican national political goals. But the winds of change are blowing our way.

The question looms large - given our president's stubborn insistence on maintaining the status quo with Cuba even when Cuba is changing - and that is how do we take advantage of this once-in-47-years opportunity?

Perhaps the Bush in Washington should talk to the Bush in Florida, or the Bush in Texas, on this one. My guess is they would give him wiser counsel than what he has thus far received.

And, finally, Harry Reid.

It has concerned me for a while that the publisher of the other paper that is delivered with the Las Vegas Sun was able to criticize Nevada's senior senator - with nary a whimper of protest - for missing the pomp and circumstance in Washington, D.C., surrounding the memorial service for former President Gerald R. Ford.

Harry was in South America with a Senate delegation doing what the Bush administration has not done in six years - paying attention to our neighbors - and didn't get back in time to attend the service at Washington's National Cathedral.

The R-J's boss thought Sen. Reid should have been there. Harry did the rest of official Washington one better, though. He attended the real funeral service for President Ford in Michigan, with family and friends, where our former president was laid to rest.

But that is Nevada's Harry Reid. Given the impossibility of being in two places at one time, he chose the substance of doing his job over the form of being seen at the Washington event. That has always been his strong suit.

And, whether Sherm Frederick or anyone else at the other paper whose goal it is to hound and continually criticize the majority leader of the U.S. Senate want to admit it, there was one other person at President Ford's funeral who would have insisted that Harry Reid exalt substance over form.

That man would have told Harry to finish his trip in South America because he,too, was a man who worked every day for the American people and did it because it was noble and good, not because it looked good. Yes, President Gerald R. Ford would have told Harry Reid to do exactly what he did. And he would have scolded Sherm and his gang for being so petty.

But, he couldn't. And there's the pity.