Strolling through an Internet news database a few days after President George W. Bush delivered his State of the Union address, I decided to do a little search.

I entered the words “Bush” and “ambitious agenda” and – whoosh! – I was nearly swamped in the cascade of hits that resulted.

Then I noticed something odd: The vast majority of the hits came from early last year, clustered around the time of the 2005 State of the Union address.

In part, this is just more evidence of journalism’s herd instinct. Once some commentator or publicist starts using a cool phrase like “Bush’s ambitious agenda,” everybody wants to use it and we all start mooing in unison.

Yet, even in the world of Washington punditry, reality eventually obtrudes and spoils the fun, like Mom telling you to turn down that awful music and pay attention. The blowhard community, including me, has begun to notice that Bush’s agenda isn’t ambitious at all – and probably never was. And now that we’ve noticed, we’ll probably blame Bush for something that is our fault as much as his.

If there was any doubt of Bush’s withered program, the speech last week removed it. The triumphalism of early 2005 was altogether gone.

In place of his “revolutionary” scheme to reform Social Security, Bush offered a commission to study entitlements. His signature pledge to simplify the federal tax code escaped with barely a peep, as did proposals to reform the budget process and resolve the litigation crisis.

This is not to say that Bush suppressed his customary grandiloquence. He scolded the citizenry for its “addiction” to oil and sent aloft several capitalized initiatives: one in American Competitiveness, another in Advanced Energy, still another in Health Care.

But the president’s heart clearly wasn’t in it. Beyond all those capital letters the initiatives proved to be small-bore – mini-measures of federal micromanagement that disdainful Republicans used to call “Clintonian.”

Indeed, the speech’s only joke involved a warm reference to Bill Clinton. The moment was revealing. For it’s become increasingly clear that the presidencies of the two men have much more in common than either would like to admit.

Most obvious of all, Clinton’s rhetorical technique seems to have been a decisive influence on Bush. As president during a remarkably placid time, Clinton would conjure up the grandest possible formulations to characterize the smallest imaginable innovations.

In his State of the Union addresses, for example, Clinton might declare, as he did in 1997, that “we face a challenge as great as any in our peacetime history” as a way of introducing federal initiatives to shorten commuting times or lengthen the hospital stays of mastectomy patients. “The enemy of our time,” Clinton would say, with a vigorous thrust of the thumb, “is inaction.”

Bush shares this taste for incessant busyness cloaked in high-minded rhetoric. The cleanup following Hurricane Katrina, for example, wasn’t itself daunting enough; in Bush’s speeches it must involve an Urban Homesteading Act and Worker Recovery Accounts – an “unprecedented” approach to eradicating poverty once and for all.

And don’t forget – though you probably did – that during one particularly slow stretch in January 2004, Bush decided suddenly to announce a manned mission to Mars. The initiative has scarcely been heard of since. But it did keep everyone stimulated for a few days, until we found something else to get excited about.

Given that both a Democratic and Republican president have succumbed to the same rhetorical grandiosity, we should look beyond both of them in tracing its origins. Overstimulation seems to have become a permanent condition of U.S. politics.

Most likely it’s a creature of the political culture itself, which is, alas, a reflection of the larger U.S. culture. Both are defined by an itty-bitty attention span and a constant craving for stimulation. Politicians and journalists of the Baby Boom generation need to believe that they are embarked on great things – witnesses to, or actors in, world-historical movements and events.

This craving is a beast that Bush no less than Clinton has felt obliged to feed. And so he has fed it with words and pledges of furious activity. Hence this ambitious agenda whose feasibility was seldom considered and was, finally, beside the point.

The difference between Bush and Clinton, though, is that Bush didn’t have to do this. Missing from his domestic calculations has been the fact that we are already at war – and not just one of those metaphorical wars that politicians are always declaring on poverty or racism or disease, but a real war, with bombs exploding and guns going off and people getting killed.

The miscalculation was politically costly. When Bush pretended last year to be something other than a war president, and he wandered the country as the accountant-in-chief giving lectures about Social Security’s actuarial tables, the public’s opinion of him sank like a plumb. A grand attempt at tax simplification or some other domestic reform, which misguided allies continue to urge on him, would only sink his reputation further.

There is good news in Bush’s disappearing domestic agenda. A war presidency should be enough excitement for anybody. At last, the weight of reality has become too much to ignore – just like Mom, telling us all to pipe down and pay attention.

Mr. Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg News.