President George W. Bush spoke in Pittsburgh yesterday and said nothing.

Actually, he said… President George W. Bush spoke in Pittsburgh yesterday and said nothing.

Actually, he said quite a lot – five pages worth of speech at a fund-raising luncheon, with lip service paid to everyone from House Speaker Dennis Hastert – whom he called “Denny” – to his mom. He also addressed issues ranging from the ongoing occupation in Iraq to third quarter annualized growth numbers to why most Americans could use a jog.

But Bush said nothing about the World Trade Organization’s recent ruling that the United States’ steel tariffs were illegal, as he was expected to do – an expectation that garnered about 180 articles listed on Google News previewing the speech, as well as protestors from the steel industry rallying outside the Westin Hotel and Convention Center, where Bush spoke.

For all the media’s bated breath, nothing was said, a political miscalculation that could cost Bush much of his support from Western Pennsylvania businesses.

Pittsburgh doesn’t mill the steel it once did, but it’s still a town with a long memory, and one in which the mill days have become part of the local personality. Ignoring the steel issue – which opens the U.S. steel industry to foreign competition – in Pittsburgh is a downright foolish thing to do.

And it’s especially foolish when one of the luncheon’s co-chairs was U.S. Steel’s Chairman and CEO Thomas Usher, who, in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, said he was “quite anxious to see the president” about this issue.

The speech Bush did make was pure fluff – it was to a friendly audience, with the media relegated to a guarded box and not allowed to ask questions. In a speech to his supporters, Bush could have directly addressed this hot-button issue and, even if he did not take a strong stance, given it the attention it deserved. Instead he talked about everything but, floundering under the spotlight. His was a weak reaction from a president whose approval ratings are getting weaker.

Perhaps he was afraid that taking a stance would alienate his business supporters, who paid $2,000 a plate for the privilege of seeing him. Pittsburgh is a pretty Democratic town, and, if he wants to win Pennsylvania in 2004, he’ll need whatever votes he can scrounge.

With his popular support declining, perhaps he chose silence over committing to an unpopular policy, a silence that speaks more to his inability to answer concretely than his words would have.