Tonight, Bush is giving his annual State of the Union address (timed, or course, to steal headlines from the Iowa caucuses). While it should contain the standard wolf in sheep’s clothing proposals (or should that be “elephant in donkey’s clothing”), I can’t help but think that there’s a big surprise in store. Bush clearly needs to set the agenda for the next year as well as frame the debate to put the Democrats on the defensive.

Last year, he did this, in part, by announcing a program to try to help stop the spread of AIDS in Africa. What made this proposal so shocking was that it was an issue that conservatives couldn’t even be bothered to mention before (not unlike human rights abuses pre-Iraq). Of course, like most of his proposals, this one just turned out to be another conservative Trojan horse, used to sneak a radical agenda past an unsuspecting public.

Will this year be the same? I’ve already written about my fears that Bush’s “visionary” Mars plan is going to be used to cripple gathering of environmental data, but I can’t stop shaking the thought that there’s another big proposal that’s going to be announced. There’s a few ideas that have crossed my mind, but the one that keeps coming back to me is health care.

What if Bush unveiled a program that he calls “universal health care”? Well, it would put the Democrats on the defensive. Big time. Regardless of what the details of the plan actually are, Bush could easily use his bully pulpit to tout a faux-single payer solution that would make him look like a genius to voters while only moderately pissing off his conservative base. The way I see it, universal health care is gonna happen eventually. If Bush gains the upper hand, he could spin it in a way that would save his big business buddies millions in healthcare costs for employees, funnel the handling of this healthcare through private insurers, make the Democrats look less progressive on this issue than he is, and hide all the costs in deficits, cuts in other programs, or a payroll tax increase. If he sees the writing on the wall, what to stop him from taking the issue and twisiting into another conservative handout to the rich?

Granted these are all stream of consciousness, worst case scenario predictions that will probably never really happen. But then again, I never expected Bush to pretend he cared about human rights abuses by dictators or the AIDS crisis in Africa either.