President George W. Bush will give a big speech in Washington today on spending and taxes. The president will probably will give a forthright defense of his tax cuts, and argue that Congress should pass legislation to make them permanent.

Bush also will probably push for the line item veto so that he may do his own de-earmarking, slashing pork from the federal budget. He may even (this is my guess) announce some sort of agreement on the two-month-long budget impasse in Congress.

This is a president we can call Bush the Strong. But it is one of two Bushes, as the president himself reminded us over the weekend. On Saturday night at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, the president paired up with an impersonator, Steve Bridges. The duo was meant to be funny and some people thought it was.

But the act also served as a reminder of a two Bushes pattern, which in turn helps explain why the president has such a hard time getting his ideas through.

Bush the Strong is the tax-cut fellow. Word is that, even as I type this, Bush is hauling Senator Charles Grassley, chairman of the Finance Committee, and Bill Thomas, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, to the White House to force them to cut a budget deal.

Strong Bush’s tax philosophy has already been vindicated, both by the shallow recession and the powerhouse recovery. As Bloomberg News’s Matthew Benjamin noted this week, productivity gains have continued late into the recovery in extraordinary fashion.

You can hate Strong Bush all you want. But with unemployment under 5 percent, a spectacular growth rate, and so many interest rate hikes already behind us, it is hard to argue that his policies ruined the U.S. economy.

Strong Bush is also of course evident in the war – the president who goes where his father didn’t dare to. The war in Iraq is much longer and harder than anyone imagined. Still, much of the logic of White House foreign policy positions is accepted by the president’s opponents even as they criticize Bush, the man.

Madeleine Albright provides a good example. Former President Bill Clinton’s secretary of state is this week publishing a foreign-policy book with a title that is positively neocon: “The Mighty and the Almighty.”

Speaking to an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York Monday night, Albright said that in Bush’s open expressions of piety, the president isn’t outrageous but rather “in the mainstream.” Albright said she understood well the reasons for toppling the Taliban. She berated Bush for failing to recognize that it was she, and not he, who started push-for-democracy initiatives at the State Department. By evening’s end it was easy to see that Albright disapproved intensely of Bush, and hard to discern the basis for her disapproval.

But there is also Weak Bush, the one who has never vetoed big-spending legislation. This Bush is hurting his own tax-cut legacy by allowing all of Congress’s extra spending projects. This is also the Bush who went along with the creation of the Medicare drug entitlement, the greatest domestic error of his presidency.

On foreign policy, the weak Bush erred by deploying too few troops in Iraq from the start. Where are the extra divisions necessary to secure Iraq? You can argue that Bush ought to have removed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld long ago. But a decision such as the scale of the U.S. presence in Iraq rests with the president, and there the president has been too timid.

The most recent prominent display of Bush the Weak was at the White House Correspondents’ dinner itself. For there the president was not content to allow the impersonator to mock him. The president also mocked himself.

Referring to the poll ratings and the hostility of the press, the president asked: “How come I can’t have dinner with the 36 percent of the people who like me?” He made fun of his own language problems: “Nook-u-lar.” He mocked Vice President Dick Cheney for his recent hunting accident: “Where’s the great White Hunter?”

Several presidents have mispronounced “nuclear.” Doing so has almost become a sign of American manhood. And all presidents make fun of themselves at the White House Correspondents’ dinner. Still, there’s a line you shouldn’t cross with self-deprecation, and Bush crossed it.

The phenomenon of the Two Bushes hurts the U.S. cause abroad. In passive-aggressive Britain and Germany, many citizens reject attempts at humor or compromise. They choose to interpret those efforts as a point for the opposition.

In other parts of the world, the problem is worse. Humor, after all, doesn’t translate, especially not humor involving electoral phrases such as lame duck. “I’m a hustling duck. I’m a leadership of the Free World duck,” Bush said, and you just have to wonder how that came out in the Arabic.

Yigal Carmon, the head of MEMRI, a nonprofit service that translates the Middle East press, notes that there “mocking a leader is what the opposition does. A leader mocking himself is perceived as strange and an evident sign of weakness.”

Weakness and self-deprecation have helped to bring about those low approval ratings. They make defending Bush seem unwise, even for those who subscribe to his big principles. Bush has some 30 months left in the presidency, and he may as well spend them as Strong Bush. Of the two, he’s the better man.

Miss Shlaes is a columnist for Bloomberg News.