Let-Down

Bush let us down. Who's "us?" The people who are not traditional Republicans but who agree with him on foreign policy and back him on Iraq and the War on Islamism.

We crossed party lines to support Saddam's overthrow and the quest for freedom in Iraq. We voted against Dubya in 2000 and still have serious problems with much of the GOP's domestic social agenda. We might favor letting gay folks get married or legalizing pot, and differ with Bush on that, but like him we recognize a vicious and hate-filled enemy and we will close ranks to fight it. And we see America's military might as a force that can be a positive good in the world, chasing fascist tyrants from their thrones.

We're half Zell Miller and half Wendell Wilkie. You don't have to be a Bible-thumping Creationist to see and comprehend the notion of "evil."

If all that is so clear to us, and to George W. Bush, why didn't he articulate it against Kerry in Thursday's debate?

Mark Steyn, who's been a Bush-backer all along, frenkly admits that Bush's performance was a big swing-and-a-miss.

In Thursday night's televised debate with John Kerry, he wasn't wrong on the substance, he just didn't have enough of it. ... Bush droned, repeatedly, that Kerry was sending "mixed messages", but his own message could have done with being a little less robotically unmixed. He said: "It's tough. It's hard work. It's incredibly hard -- and it's hard work. It is hard work," again and again, round in circles.

And it is, no doubt. It's tough and it's hard work and it's incredibly hard doing the title number of Singin' in the Rain, but Gene Kelly made it seem blithe and effortless and graceful.

And the President of the United States owes his people a performance -- in wartime especially. Churchill didn't just communicate the weight of the burden that he carried but also that he had the strength to bear it.

But who needs Churchill? It's not just that Tony Blair or John Howard of Australia could have done the job much more convincingly. Almost any of us armchair warriors could have put down John Kerry's feeble generalisations better than Bush did.

Why couldn't Bush at least puncture the hot-air balloons Kerry kept shaping, in his rotund baritone, about "allies" and "summits" and "global tests?" This was supposed to be Bush's knock-out punch. That's why the Republicans, in the debate negotiations, pushed this one to the front of the schedule. Yet he lost it on points.

It's been left to the guys in pajamas to dismantle Kerry's pipe dream policy. Lileks, for instance:

Perhaps the “ally” is that big blue wobbly mass known as the UN, that paragon of moral clarity, that conscience of the globe. You want to really anger a UN official? Tow his car. Short of that you can get away with anything. (Sudan is on the human rights commission, to cite a prominent and amusing detail. It’s like putting Tony Soprano on the New Jersey Waste Management Regulation Board.) I don’t worry that the UN is angry with us. I’d be worried if they weren’t. And I find it interesting that someone who would complain about outsourcing peevishly notes that we hired < psycho screeching strings > HALLIBURTON < /strings > to do the work instead of throwing buckets of billions to French and German contractors who sold them the jets and built the bunkers.