THE president's state-of-the-union message to Congress is one of the odder rituals of American politics—a mixture of pomp and circumstance (all those Supreme Court judges in their black gowns and military leaders with their chests full of medals) and frat-boy hugging and hollering. The president serves up some hokum about how “the state of the union is strong” and America is a “shining city on a hill”. Everybody stands and claps enthusiastically. He tosses out some red meat for members of his own party. Half the chamber rises to its feet. He throws in an obscure scheme to please this or that cabinet secretary. The secretary rises, while everybody else looks bemused.

It would be nice to say that it was ever thus. The constitution, after all, requires that the president “shall from time to time give to Congress information of the State of the Union”. But, like all traditions, it has gone through lots of mutations. Washington and Adams delivered speeches to Congress. But Jefferson regarded the practice as too monarchical and time-consuming—he sent a letter instead—and the practice of speechifying was only resumed by Woodrow Wilson in 1913. The current version, with its prime-time slot, boisterous applause and “American heroes” sitting in the first lady's box, is a product of the television age.

Mr Bush looked as cocky as ever on Monday evening. But his performance demonstrated how much he has changed over the years. In his first address to Congress in February 2001 he presented himself as a compassionate centrist. He focused on improving education. He told Congress that “together we are changing the tone in the nation's capital”. He ended with an exhortation in Spanish: “Juntos podemos”, “Together we can”.

In his next few speeches he was Bush the warrior. In 2002 he chastised the “axis of evil”. In 2003 he pressed the case for invading Iraq. A year later he was still talking about disrupting “dozens of weapons-of-mass-destruction-related programme activities”. In 2005 he laid out a big agenda for reforming Social Security, fixing immigration and spreading freedom round the world.

On January 28th he was a diminished figure—a man whose domestic reforms have turned to dust and whose war on terror has gone wrong. He made the case for stimulating the economy and continuing the “surge” in Iraq. But he is not important to either policy: a bipartisan stimulus package is already in the works and the fate of the surge depends on his successor. He declared war on pork-barrel spending. But over the past seven years he has signed spending bills containing about 55,000 “earmarks” worth more than $100 billion. The rest was either boilerplate or small bore: praise for tax cuts and free markets, schemes such as giving hiring preferences to military spouses. The media were more interested in Barack Obama's failure to acknowledge Hillary Clinton's existence, even though she was sitting a few feet from him, and the way he made a point of talking to his neighbour, Edward Kennedy.

For the rest of his presidency Mr Bush will be a president in search of a soapbox. His favourability rating stands at about 30%, compared with over 80% when he gave his axis-of-evil speech. The Democratic majority in Congress has no time for him. He is unlikely to command the global goodwill necessary to engage in the bursts of diplomacy that marked Ronald Reagan's or Bill Clinton's last years in office. Mr Bush has defined American politics since he took office—commanding extraordinary loyalty from his fellow Republicans and driving Democrats into paroxysms of Bushophobia. Political armies were raised either to demonise the president or to demonise the demonisers. But both parties recognise that their challenge now is to fashion a new politics for a post-Bush world.

Mr Obama and Mrs Clinton agree on almost every detail of policy: they disagree bitterly about how politics ought to be conducted in this new world. Mr Obama believes he can transcend not just Mr Bush but the partisan politics that have dominated the Bush era. He wants to use the combination of his soaring rhetoric and his broad appeal to change the weather of American politics—hence his admiration for Mr Reagan's power to transform politics, if not for what he did with that power. Mrs Clinton seems to regard herself more as a new chief executive preparing to take over a company that has been run into the ground. She emphasises that she knows how to pull the levers of power in Washington to get things done—and she regards talk of transcending partisanship as naive waffle that could lead the country to disaster.





Conservative civil war

The debate about the post-Bush world is even deeper on the right. The Republicans are currently beset not just by wars between factions (business versus evangelicals versus centrist McCainiacs, which could be patched up if electoral necessity demands it), but by fundamental philosophical divisions. Liberated from the need to defend Mr Bush from his enemies, Republicans are asking difficult questions that have lain buried for years. Should they return to Reaganism or ditch it? Is there room in conservatism for worries about global warming, prison rape or water-boarding? And what role should faith play in conservative politics? If the Republicans are defeated in November, these arguments will become a cacophony.

The results of these debates will, paradoxically, reveal a huge amount about the man who commanded the stage on Monday. The Clintonistas may turn out to be right, and Mr Obama's “Yes we can” slogan may prove as empty as Mr Bush's “Juntos podemos”. Or perhaps the conservatives will discover that the only way to keep the Republican coalition intact is to re-embrace Mr Bush's big government, tax cuts and evangelical moralism. As with so much else in American politics at the moment, it is a matter of waiting and seeing.