Obama's Speech a Notre Dame

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Limbaugh and the GOP are having a Nutty!

They know it's coming - the massive Perfect Shit Storm that's going to sweep them right out of Congress. The Congress they fought, connived, cheated and swindled their way into. They can feel it and chiggers crawling on their skin - and it's driving them over the freaking edge.

They're having a full on nutty.

This is what happens when you find yourself in a corner, sweating and desperate. You begin to lash out uncontrollably.

Sometimes you might even hit yourself in the process, and that's exactly what were seeing from the GOP these last few weeks before the Mid-Team Bloodbath Elections.

Neat aint it?

First of course we had Senator Felix Macaca-witz, who decided, like oh-so-many neo-cons that he was the smartest guy in the room so he'd sling the absolutely perfect racial slur at a Camera-man from the Jim Webb campaign. The fact that his own mother happens to have been a french speaking woman from North Africa - and the slur french slang for dark skinned people in North Africa - and the Camera-man was of Morrocan Indian desent with dark skin - was all just some odd concidence.

The fact that this was said on camera somehow didn't occur Felix.

Then you've got Republican candidate Tan Nguyen from Orange County California who is himself an immigrant, deciding it was a good idea send a fradulent letter to every person with a spanish surname in the county threatening them with arrest or deportation if they tried to vote. Of course he claimed he had nothing to do with, unless you count personally purchasing the voter list that was used for the mailing.

In Tennesee we've got the RNC and Republican Senate Candidate Bob Corker playing the Mandigo-Card with their ads against Harold Ford Jr. Not just once, but twice (audio).

Dennis the Menace Hastert in the House is going after Nancy Pelosi for ignoring immigration by claiming

Democrat Leader Nancy Pelosi has NEVER visited the border. She claims to understand the needs of those on the front lines but has never visited those agents and offers no solutions.

Yeah, well that's great except that she has backed numerous border security measures and has been to the border and visit with border patrol agents in El Paso. They're are even pictures and stuff.

Rep. Jean (Murtha's a Coward) Schmidt is having her nutty over the fact that her Democratic opponent Victoria Wulsin is actually daring to use her own words on the house floor attacking Murtha against her in campaign ads. Specifically her accusations against John Murtha who nearly a year ago called for a timetable (much like the one the President is now crowing about) for redeploying our troops out of Iraq.

"Her continued violation will land her in serious trouble with the House Ethics Committee," Schmidt's spokesman Matt Perin said in a release, referring to the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, which the release mistakenly referred to elsewhere as the "House Committee on Official Standards and Conduct."

Yeah, that's nice except that Wulsin isn't in Congress yet - and therefore isn't under the perview of the House Ethnics(less) Committee. This is the dim-bulb that beat Paul Hacket two years ago? Sheesh.

Lastly we have Rush (The Oxy-Viagra King) Limbaugh, who thought it would be humorous to talk about Micheal Fox going off his meds to do a pro stem-cell research commercial. He's claimed that Fox hasn't done any commercial like this for Republicans. He's wrong. Fox did an ad for Arlen Spector as was shown on Countdown.

FOX: Biomedical research could cure hundreds of diseases, save thousands of lives, and prevent millions of tears. I understand that, and so does Arlen Specter. He helped double the funding for biomedical research, more dollars for more research, for more cures.

Arlen gets it. It`s that simple.

SEN. ARLEN SPECTER ®, PENNSYLVANIA: I`m Arlen Specter and approved this ad to tell you there is hope for the future.

After issuing his non-apology apology, Rush went on to state:

I believe Democrats have a long history of using victims of various things as political spokespeople because they believe they are untouchable, infallible, they are immune from criticism.

This sort of tact seems to bring us right back to Ann Coulter the those "Harpies" that lost their husbands and sons in the destruction of the World Trade Center and dared to support Democrats who want to actually implement the suggestions of the 9-11 Commission which they fought hard to have convened doesn't it?

Fox's Response to Limbaugh : I could give a damn about Rush Limbaugh's pity or anyone else's pity. I'm not a victim.

All of this stuff is not an accident. Limbaugh's comment is itself very telling. You see all of these people that Republicans are attacking - Immigrants, Blacks, the parents of our fallen Soldiers such as Cindy Sheehan, the survivors of 9-11 and their families, the survivors of debilitating disease, the people of the Gulf Coast and New Orleans - the most vulnerable, the canaries in the coal mines of our society are exactly the people that their party has failed time and time again.

They aren't being exploited by Democrats - they have chosen to embrace Democrats (and some Republicans) because they share values and they share goals. This is what a great many people are slowly beginning to realize, people such as former Republican Michael Schiavo.

Oops, lost another one to Dietech The Democrats

The GOP isn't looking out for the best interests of the vast majority of the American public. They're only out to line their own pockets with graft from the U.S. Treasury.

Not long ago they wouldn't have dared to be this blatant - they would simply railed against "Libruls" who almost always were nothing more than a surrogate for Black, Hispanic, Poor and Sick people and their interests. They tried to buy off the Black and Hispanic vote by going after them through their Churches - but the cover's been blown on that scam thanks to former White House Official David Kuo.

They've run out of options. There are no more pre-set plays to put on the field. They're winging it.

And now the deep-seated Racism, Sexism and disdain for those in need that is at the core of the Republican Party is finally bubbing back up to the surface.

• They failed to address Osama Bin Laden after the Bombing of the U.S.S. Cole and gave him free pass to attack us again on 9/11.


• They've allowed millions of Americans to lose their health insurance and pensions.


• They were wrong to invade Iraq without a valid justification using lies they gained through TORTURE, and have completely bungled the occupation and reconstruction of that country.

Faced with the truth of their own abject failure, they've reflexively falling back on that old standby - Blame the Victim Survivors or their incompetence and negligence.

Contrary to the claims of commentators on Disney/GOP TV's Nightline that Democrats have been "just as nasty" - they simply don't need to be. The facts and the truth are an automatically negative ad against Republicans.

Just watch and share the DNC's New Web Ad.

All we have to do is point out that Republicans have no plan. Are they going to "Stay the Course" or are they going to "Adapt to Win" - or maybe they're going to "Stay the Win" by "Adapting the Course"... do they really know? Does anyone? Obviously they don't.

In response Democrats have a duty, a sacred responsibility to rise above the muck - to raise the level of debate and discourse in this country, to bring honor back to the nation.

Let the Republicans flail away in the mud, it's is a fitting end for their ideological kind.

Vyan

White House Lies about Stem Cell Study

Thinkprogress:

Today, a new study was published that shows embryonic stem cells lines can be created without the destruction of human embryos. Previously, the White House has said they oppose the creation of new stem cell lines because it involved the destruction of embryos.

In today’s New York Times, White House spokeswoman Emily Lawrimore said “Any use of human embryos for research purposes raises serious ethical questions. This technique does not resolve those concerns.” This afternoon, the White House changed their story. Here’s Deputy Press Secretary Dana Perino:

QUESTION: Any decision to perhaps revisit the President’s position on federal funding for stem cell research, in light of this new development that was published yesterday in the journal Nature?

PERINO: …This study today reported in Nature Magazine has not been reviewed by scientists and bio-ethicists yet, but it is one that the President believes deserves a good look. He is encouraged that there are scientists who are continuing to look for innovative ways to do stem cell research that would not involve the destruction of embryos. And so he is going to listen to folks after they have a chance to review the study, but it does hold some promise that they would be able to do that type of research without destruction of a human embryo.

This is false. ThinkProgress spoke with bioethicist Ronald Green, who is an ethics advisor to Robert Lanza, an author of the study. Green said that in order to be published in Nature, the paper went through a rigourous peer review process, which lasted nearly three months.

The study was also reviewed by bioethicts. It was reviewed and approved by the Ethics Advisory Board of Advanced Cell Technology. Also an independent review board was constituted to scrutinize the study, as required by Massachusetts law.

Ameri-Qaeda!

Read a couple of great posts today on the subject of Osama bin-Merica. How the Fundie-wing points the finger at Democrats as being terrorist sympathisers when they - correctly - point out that the Bush Administration War Of Terror policies are a completely failure... yet when you actually look at the backbone of Bush's support, they seem eerily similar to someone else we all know and loath.

From Media Matters.

Several media figures have seized on Osama bin Laden's newly released audiotape to denounce critics of the Bush administration's conduct of the war in Iraq. Explicitly asserting comparisons between bin Laden and prominent war critics, including filmmaker Michael Moore and Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairman Howard Dean, MSNBC's Hardball host Chris Matthews and others are condemning legitimate dissent over the merits of the Iraq war and President Bush's actions in its prosecution. That dissent is now shared not just by such favorite conservative targets as Moore and Dean, but, now, by a plurality -- or even a majority -- of the American people. As Daou Report founder and editor Peter Daou wrote, in a January 19 entry at The Huffington Post weblog, in response to Matthews's comments linking bin Laden's statements to Moore:"[T]his is not just about Chris Matthews or Michael Moore or Osama Bin Laden, it's about the willingness of a prominent media figure to slander an opponent of the war."

From the January 19 edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes:

GINGRICH: I think it's quite clear as you point out, Sean, that from this tape, that bin Laden and his lieutenants are monitoring the American news media, they're monitoring public opinion polling, and I suspect they take a great deal of comfort when they see people attacking United States policies. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be a free society and have open debate, but we should recognize, when some of our politicians use very extreme language or some of our celebrities -- like Michael Moore -- use very extreme language, that the enemy does, in fact, take great comfort from that.

HANNITY: It's more than that. I think it's also the leaders in the Democratic Party that, from the very beginning, have undermined this war. If I were to give you a quiz, Mr. Speaker, and if I would say to you, "You know, was it [Sen.] Ted Kennedy [D-MA], [House Democratic Leader] Nancy Pelosi [D-CA], [Rep.] John Murtha [D-PA] who said, 'George Bush gives continuous, deliberate misinformation. Polls reveal that we want to withdraw from Iraq.' " You would have guessed either of -- any of those. Well, it was bin Laden who said that.

So you wanna play Hardball, eh? by DarkSyde

They are vehemently against abortion, they resist progressive woman's rights. They view homosexuality as a crime against nature and God, some advocate the death penalty as an option for it. Separation of Church and State is despised by these folks; they insist the nation is founded on the principles of their religion, and they work hard to bring that de facto theocracy about. They deplore strong language, gay characters, and sexual content on TV and in the media. And they ignore the Geneva Convention when it suits their ideological purposes, including provisions against torture or due process. They're anti-stem cell research, pro-creationism, and generally distrustful of science. These folks are easily whipped into a state of frenzy with ideological manipulation to the point where they will commit violence, or at least tacitly endorse that violence is acceptable, if it advances their Divine agenda. They then take great pains to justify that violence, including unprovoked attack of civilian areas, under certain conditions, with convoluted theological gymnastics. They are almost to the man pro-death penalty ... Am I railing against the religious right again?

Could be, but my target here is actually Al Qaeda and related fundamentalist Wahhabism; the source of terrorism, the scourge of our planet, the Axis of Evil.

Continued...

The modern GOP is a precarious alliance between moderate, sane, conservatives, corporate interests understandably focused on short term profits, and a fundamentalist mob whose social policies poll anywhere between unpopular to repugnant among the majority of Americans.

The moderates are the official face set forth in PR efforts, the corporate interests drive the money, and like in any feudal system, the cultish masses provide the votes and do the grassroots work. But there's a glaring weakness: Expose that extremist base for what it is, flip that rock over to illuminate the ugly squatting trolls hiding underneath, and it's game over folks. Here's one way to go about doing that, and in all fairness we should thank the GOP shills on Cable News and all across the blogosphere for bringing it our attention and warming up the soundbite for us so nicely.

Osama bin Laden:

The religion of the Unification of God; of freedom from associating partners with Him, and rejection of this; of complete love of Him, the Exalted; of complete submission to His Laws

Osama bin Laden calling for 'morality':

We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honour, and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling's, and trading with interest.

Osama bin Laden on Bill Clinton:

Who can forget your President Clinton's immoral acts committed in the official Oval office?

Osama bin Laden on women in the workplace:

You are a nation that exploits women like consumer products or advertising tools calling upon customers to purchase them. You use women to serve passengers, visitors, and strangers to increase your profit margins.

Osama bin Laden on AIDS:

[Y]ou have been described in history as a nation that spreads diseases that were unknown to man in the past. Go ahead and boast to the nations of man, that you brought them AIDS as a Satanic American Invention

Osama bin Laden on gambling:

You are a nation that permits gambling in its all forms. The companies practice this as well, resulting in the investments becoming active and the criminals becoming rich.

And that's just from one of Osama's barking at the moon bat shit crazy religious screeds. I don't know about you folks, but that doesn't sound very liberal to me. But it sure sounds like something I might hear on the GOP/fundie talk radio ...

So, when the extremist nutcases in our country start comparing patriotic Democrats and Progressives with Osama bin Laden, welcome the opportunity to point out that the present incarnation of the GOP is controlled by the religious right, the Theocons, who bear disturbing parallels to the most wanted man in the world. And you don't have to be able to whip out a bunch of quotes, all you need to remember is a simple soundbite and they will open the door for you.

The religious right is Osama bin Laden light.

Amen to that, brother - Amen.

Vyan

Radical Neo-Conectomy

Over a year ago I wrote these words....

When will the Repubs finally reach their breaking point with Bush?

And finally it appears that the Republican Party has just about reached that precipice. It's not because they still haven't found Osama Bin Ladin. It's not because we haven't found any WMD's or connection between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. It's not because of Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, massive voter fraud, the forged Niger documents, school drop-outs, 51 ignored FAA Warnings about Al Qaeda Highjackings, intelligent design, the bungled flu-vaccine, skyrocketing deficits, increased abortions, explosive government spending or even the tragic aftermath of Katrina.

It's because of Harriet Miers.

George Will - Such is the perfect perversity of the nomination of Harriet Miers that it discredits, and even degrades, all who toil at justifying it.

Ann Coulter - I have finally hit upon a misdeed by the Bush administration so outrageous, so appalling, so egregious, I am calling for a bipartisan commission with subpoena power to investigate: Who told the president to nominate Harriet Miers? The commission should also be charged with getting an answer to this question: Who was his second choice?

Robert Bork - With a single stroke--the nomination of Harriet Miers--the president has damaged the prospects for reform of a left-leaning and imperialistic Supreme Court, taken the heart out of a rising generation of constitutional scholars, and widened the fissures within the conservative movement. That's not a bad day's work--for liberals.

Robert Novak - George W. Bush's agents have convinced conservative Republican senators who were heartsick over his nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court that they must support her to save his presidency. But that does not guarantee her confirmation. Ahead are hearings of unspeakable ugliness that can be prevented only if Democratic senators exercise unaccustomed restraint.

Right-Wing Conservatives have finally begun to throw Bush under the Bus. In his most recent Salon column former Clinton White House official Sidney Blumenthal points out that conservatives are turning on Bush, despite the fact that...

President Bush brought the neoconservatives, banished by Ronald Reagan and Bush Sr., back into government, and followed their scenario to the letter for remaking the Middle East through an invasion of Iraq, using 9/11 as the pretext. He meticulously followed the right-wing script on supply-side economics, enacting an enormous tax cut for the wealthy that fostered a deficit that dwarfed Reagan's, the problem his father had tried to resolve through a tax increase that earned the right's hostility. And Bush has followed the religious right's line on stem cell research, abortion and creationism

Blumenthal goes on to point out that the neo-cons are now claiming that Bush is a False-conservative. The policies and ideology of neo-conservativism haven't completely and utterly failed in the same manner as Stalinist Communism -- it simply hasn't been implemented by a genuine, true blue, white and RED conservative. They now see Bush is a "traitor" to the Great Conservative Cause.

But I for one think they dost protest far too much, because the truth, as Blumenthal points out, is that Bush has been the most relentlessly idealogically conservative President this country has ever seen, and the result has been a completely total and absolute failure on all counts. It's something that I believe the country needed to experience first hand in order to fully realize the danger that true neo-conservative presents to the function of a free society. It's true purpose is corporate neo-facism, to shift the balance of power into the hands of those who already powerful -- calcify that power and then abandon the rest of us. It seeks only to protect their interests and no others, using the full force of law to extended bankrupcy, environmental and heathcare exemptions for corportations while increasing debt, poverty and sickness for the private individuals who do the work those corporations need, and consume the products they create.

Even with the President's approval ratings begining to slide toward the mid-30% mark, the Harriet Miers debacle has been the first significant crack in the armor of his most ardent supporters. I doubt it has even begun yet, but eventually the rank and file grass roots of the Conservative Republicans will also start to move away and reject the President and his Neo-con cabal. This is what they fear, and why they are trying to distance themselves - and neo-conservativism - from a President who is increasingly becoming radioactive as Fitmas rapidly approaches.

There have already been many defections, starting with American Spectator columnist David Brock in the mid-90's and including people such as Governor and former EPA head Christine Todd Whitman, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil, Ambassador Joe Wilson -- and possibly former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

What needs to happen isn't the personal destruction of the President or his aides - but rather the ideology of neo-conservatism needs to be exposed for what it truly is, then completely, totally excised from the body politic. There are indeed honest Conservatives and Republicans of conscience - like Wilson, Whitman and others they have been marginalized and systematically sidelined by the powerlust of the neo-cons. The Republican Party can be rebuilt, but first it and American must be purged this Cancer. We need a Radical Neo-Conectomy. Each and every portion of their malignacy needs to be removed before American can heal.

But even with the furor over the Miers nomination, we certainly haven't reached that time yet.

Some entrepid bloggers on Dailykos have theorized that the Valerie Plame investigation just might find that some 60-70 foreign assets as well as at least one U.S. undercover operative may have lost their lives due to White House persoenel blowing Plame's and Brewster-Jenning cover. If this is true it could mean that those soon to be indicted by Special Prosecutor Patrict Fitzgerald will be facing a possible Death Penalty case.

Will having the President's Deputy Chief of Staff (Karl Rove), and the Vice President Chief of Staff (Lewis "Scooter" Libby) on trial for their lives finally turn the tide for the rank-and-file?

Possibly - and possibly not.

But if Bush follows the post Iran-Contra/Whitewater script and dares to pardon them for their crimes, it just might become an entirely different story. That would certainly be what I would call - Treason.

And it just might finally get the scalpals out and ready to be used by the rank and file electorate to save America from itself.

Vyan

Frists amazing break with the Radical Right on Stem Cells

Cross posted on Dailykos:

Yesterday on C-Span, Senator/Doctor Bill Frist announced his position on funding of Stem Cell Research, making a strong break with the Bush Administration and the GOP majority.

He supports it.

Click to view statements from C-Span.org.

Senator Frist's comments on the Senate Floor:

"Since 2001. when Stem Cell reseach first captured our nation's attention, I've said that many times - the issue should be and will be reviewed on an ongoing basis. Not just because the science holds tremendous promise, but because it's developing with breath-taking speed. Indeed, stem cell research present that first major moral and ethical challenge to bio-medical research in the 21st Century."

"Everyday we unlock more of the mysteries of life, and more ways to enhance our health. This compels profound questions."

"How we answer these questions today, impacts not only current research by future research as well."

"So when I as a heart transplant surgeon, remove that human heart from someone who is brain-dead and I place it in the chest of someone who'se heart has failed them - in order to give them new life - I do so within an ethical construct that honors dignity and respect of a donor and a recipient. Like transplantation, if we can answer the moral and ethical questions about stem cell research I believe we will have the oppurtunity to save many lives and make countless other's lives more fulfilling. That's why we must get our stem cell policy right. Scientifically and ethically."

"As we know, Adult stem cell research is not controversial on ethical grounds, although embryonic stem cell research is. Right now, to derive these stem cells and embryo, or a blastocyst, which man including myself consider nascient human life, must be destroyed. But I also strongly believe as do countless other scientist and clinicians and doctors, that embryonic stem cells uniquely hold specific promise for some therapies and cure that adult stem cells can not provide.

Let me just say that I believe today, as I stated four years ago in 2001 prior the current policy was established, that the federal government should fund embryonic stem cell research. As I stated in 2001, we should fund research only on embryonic stems cells derived from blastocyst which are left over after fertility therapy. Which will not otherwise be implanted or adopted, but instead are destined with 100% certainty by the parents to be discarded and destroyed."

Although it may be difficult to take Dr.-I-can-diagnose-a-blind-near-brain-dead-woman-via-videotape Frist completely seriously. The fact that the GOP's own Senate Majority leader has taken such a position in direct opposition to that of the President -- breaking dramatically from the lock-step mode that Republican's have been held hostage to by the Christian Right for the past 5 years - should prove quite interesting as they are forced to temper their "Democrats support Death" arguments of the past several months.

But Frist is far from the only prominent Republican to take such a position - former UN Ambassador John C. Danforth has made similar claims.

BY a series of recent initiatives, Republicans have transformed our party into the political arm of conservative Christians. The elements of this transformation have included advocacy of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, opposition to stem cell research involving both frozen embryos and human cells in petri dishes, and the extraordinary effort to keep Terri Schiavo hooked up to a feeding tube.

In my state, Missouri, Republicans in the General Assembly have advanced legislation to criminalize even stem cell research in which the cells are artificially produced in petri dishes and will never be transplanted into the human uterus. They argue that such cells are human life that must be protected, by threat of criminal prosecution, from promising research on diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and juvenile diabetes.

It is not evident to many of us that cells in a petri dish are equivalent to identifiable people suffering from terrible diseases. I am and have always been pro-life. But the only explanation for legislators comparing cells in a petri dish to babies in the womb is the extension of religious doctrine into statutory law.

Vyan

Conyers lays it out!

In a new editorial on Buzzflash.com, Rep John Conyers combines with the works of his own bloggers to create an excellent article which clearly outlines the slow and eminant demise of the Republican Party. Proving that the voiceless can be heard, and that at least some of our Representatives are still listening.

http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/05/04/con05129.html

When the history is written concerning fall from political grace of the Bush presidency, I believe we will point to the emergency passage of the Schiavo legislation as constituting the turning point. Clearly there is short term political fall-out from the unprecedented legislative intervention into a private family matter. The most recent CBS poll shows the president's popularity is at an all time low - 43%, while the Congressional approval rating is down to 34%.

...

To begin with, Americans now understand that Republicans can no longer claim the mantle of being "pro-life," when they are decimating Medicaid, when they are preventing life-saving stem cell research, when they allow guns to flow freely to terrorists, when they ignore the tragic school shooting in Minnesota, and when more than 1,500 American soldiers and more than 100,000 innocent civilians have died in Iraq as a result of a misguided war.

...

They certainly can't claim to be "pro-family," when their bankruptcy bill would put credit card companies ahead of families, when they tolerate families living on a minimum wage below the poverty level, and when the president signed legislation in Texas authorizing the removal of life support systems for financial reasons.

The Schiavo case has taught the entire country that the Republican leadership is willing to systematically cast aside the norms of politics and comity in the Congress, the courts, the state legislatures, and even our most intimate family decisions.

Read it, enjoy it - share it with your friends. This link needs to be everywhere on the web - NOW!

Vyan

In the Name of Politics

March 30, 2005

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

In the Name of Politics

By JOHN C. DANFORTH

St. Louis — BY a series of recent initiatives, Republicans have transformed our party into the political arm of conservative Christians. The elements of this transformation have included advocacy of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, opposition to stem cell research involving both frozen embryos and human cells in petri dishes, and the extraordinary effort to keep Terri Schiavo hooked up to a feeding tube.

Standing alone, each of these initiatives has its advocates, within the Republican Party and beyond. But the distinct elements do not stand alone. Rather they are parts of a larger package, an agenda of positions common to conservative Christians and the dominant wing of the Republican Party.

Christian activists, eager to take credit for recent electoral successes, would not be likely to concede that Republican adoption of their political agenda is merely the natural convergence of conservative religious and political values. Correctly, they would see a causal relationship between the activism of the churches and the responsiveness of Republican politicians. In turn, pragmatic Republicans would agree that motivating Christian conservatives has contributed to their successes.

High-profile Republican efforts to prolong the life of Ms. Schiavo, including departures from Republican principles like approving Congressional involvement in private decisions and empowering a federal court to overrule a state court, can rightfully be interpreted as yielding to the pressure of religious power blocs.

In my state, Missouri, Republicans in the General Assembly have advanced legislation to criminalize even stem cell research in which the cells are artificially produced in petri dishes and will never be transplanted into the human uterus. They argue that such cells are human life that must be protected, by threat of criminal prosecution, from promising research on diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and juvenile diabetes.

It is not evident to many of us that cells in a petri dish are equivalent to identifiable people suffering from terrible diseases. I am and have always been pro-life. But the only explanation for legislators comparing cells in a petri dish to babies in the womb is the extension of religious doctrine into statutory law.

I do not fault religious people for political action. Since Moses confronted the pharaoh, faithful people have heard God's call to political involvement. Nor has political action been unique to conservative Christians. Religious liberals have been politically active in support of gay rights and against nuclear weapons and the death penalty. In America, everyone has the right to try to influence political issues, regardless of his religious motivations.

The problem is not with people or churches that are politically active. It is with a party that has gone so far in adopting a sectarian agenda that it has become the political extension of a religious movement.

When government becomes the means of carrying out a religious program, it raises obvious questions under the First Amendment. But even in the absence of constitutional issues, a political party should resist identification with a religious movement. While religions are free to advocate for their own sectarian causes, the work of government and those who engage in it is to hold together as one people a very diverse country. At its best, religion can be a uniting influence, but in practice, nothing is more divisive. For politicians to advance the cause of one religious group is often to oppose the cause of another.

Take stem cell research. Criminalizing the work of scientists doing such research would give strong support to one religious doctrine, and it would punish people who believe it is their religious duty to use science to heal the sick.

During the 18 years I served in the Senate, Republicans often disagreed with each other. But there was much that held us together. We believed in limited government, in keeping light the burden of taxation and regulation. We encouraged the private sector, so that a free economy might thrive. We believed that judges should interpret the law, not legislate. We were internationalists who supported an engaged foreign policy, a strong national defense and free trade. These were principles shared by virtually all Republicans.

But in recent times, we Republicans have allowed this shared agenda to become secondary to the agenda of Christian conservatives. As a senator, I worried every day about the size of the federal deficit. I did not spend a single minute worrying about the effect of gays on the institution of marriage. Today it seems to be the other way around.

The historic principles of the Republican Party offer America its best hope for a prosperous and secure future. Our current fixation on a religious agenda has turned us in the wrong direction. It is time for Republicans to rediscover our roots.

John C. Danforth, a former United States senator from Missouri, resigned in January as United States ambassador to the United Nations. He is an Episcopal minister.

Frist on False Hope

Before he decided that he was an expert on Neurosurgery, Sen Majority Leader Dr. Bill Frist had a completely different take on heroic efforts to sustain and improve the life of disabled persons than he apparently does today.

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Tuesday, October 12, 2004

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist attacked Sen. John Edwards on Tuesday over a comment the Democratic vice presidential candidate made regarding actor Christopher Reeve.

Edwards said Reeve, who died Sunday, "was a powerful voice for the need to do stem cell research and change the lives of people like him.

"If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve will get up out of that wheelchair and walk again," Edwards said.

Frist, a Republican from Tennessee, called Edwards' remark "crass" and "shameful," and said it gave false hope that new treatments were imminent.

Edwards campaign spokesman Mark Kornblau hit back, "Yes, breakthrough research often takes time, but that's never been a reason to not even try -- until George Bush."

Edwards made the comment Monday while he was stumping in Newton, Iowa.

Frist, who was a heart surgeon before coming to the Senate, responded Tuesday in a conference call with reporters arranged by the Bush-Cheney campaign.

"I find it opportunistic to use the death of someone like Christopher Reeve -- I think it is shameful -- in order to mislead the American people," Frist said. "We should be offering people hope, but neither physicians, scientists, public servants or trial lawyers like John Edwards should be offering hype.

"It is cruel to people who have disabilities and chronic diseases, and, on top of that, it's dishonest. It's giving false hope to people, and I can tell you as a physician who's treated scores of thousands of patients that you don't give them false hope."

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And a voice finally speaks out from the wilderness

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Excerpt from Amazon.com

"The people of this county deserve better from their politics and their politicians than they've been getting in recent years," writes Christine Todd Whitman in It's My Party Too. While hardly high praise for George W. Bush from a former member of his Cabinet (she served as director of the Environmental Protection Agency from January 2001 to May 2003), the real targets of her ire are some of her fellow Republicans who have forced the GOP to make a hard-right turn in recent years. Whitman argues that this shift poses a serious threat to the long-term health and competitiveness of the Republicans, a party in which moderates like Whitman, Colin Powell, Rudolph Giuliani, John McCain, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and George Pataki are paraded in public when necessary, but openly opposed behind the scenes. Whitman refers to those on the far right as "social fundamentalists" whose "mission is to advance their narrow ideological agenda" by using the government to impose their views on everyone else. Though she admits that evangelicals may have helped to win the 2004 election, they have claimed much more credit than they deserve for Bush's success, and she warns that catering to this narrow group will have consequences.

To achieve long-term success, she writes, the Republicans must move their focus back to the core issues that unite the true base of the party: less government, stronger national security, lower taxes combined with spending restraints, and job creation in the private sector--issues that have largely been pushed aside by efforts to ban abortion and embryonic stem cell research and a push to amend the Constitution to prohibit gay marriage. She also offers ideas for attracting more African Americans and women to the GOP, and highlights Republican environmental successes that have been ignored. It's My Party Too is a compelling analysis of the future of the Republican Party. --Shawn Carkonen

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Today, Secretary and former Governer Christine Todd Whitman began making the rounds on the bi-polar point of the political talk show circuit, starting with the Al Franken Show on Air America Radio and finishing with Hannity and Colmes on Fox News Network. Her comments were even toned and concilliatory, but this belies the incindiary tone of her book - which points out how the facist wing of Republicans Party have taken control of the party by the throat.

None of this is news to most of America I think, but it's still shocking to see an actual Republican who seems willing to speak this truth. Whitman, according to her comments on H&c was so empowered by her decision to retire from political life. She has no plans to run for office, nothing to campaign for.

Several months ago when I began this blog I wrote in (Give me one reason) how I felt that the Republican Party was no longer something I could relate too, or respect. Prior to the Presidency of George W. Bush there were a great many Republican ideals that I agree with. I'm a fiscal conservative. I agree with cutting taxes, as long as you can either reduce spending or boost the economy to the point that you create exploding deficits which simply mean that you pay later with interest, rather than pay now. I'm a strong supporter of the 2nd Amendment and the right to bare arms - but only within it's original intention regarding the need to maintain a "well regulated militia" as the last bulwalk of freedom. I believe in the preservation of liberty, and that the goverments powers should be limited and well balanced with the powers and ability of individuals and private institutions.

Bush and as Secretary Whitman put's it, the "social fundamentalists", have turned the party - and with control of all three branches the nation - into something I can not support.

So I welcome Christine Todd Whitman back to the land of the sane. She refused to drink the coolaid, and instead stepped down from her seat as Secratary of the EPA rather than support actions and policies she knew to be damaging as they would undercut her own prior efforts as Governor of New Jersey at Environmental Protection.

I always knew that there were Republicans who hated to be told that they're only out to make a few more cheap bucks at the expense of the environment, at the expense of "the little man", and at the expense of civil and human rights.

It's good to see one these people finally jump out of lock-step, and stand up for what they truly believe - and more importantly, what is good for the American people - rather than continually spew the party line of the day, to the point of even perjuring themselves as our new Secretary of State as future Attorney General seem so willing to do.

There may be hope for all the rest of the those Republican's yet... assumming of course the Christine Todd Whitman can survive the excoriation and charges of "traitor" that she is sure to recieve from the oh-so-highly-tolerant leaders of the party such as Rove, Lott, Frist and Delay.

At least the fireworks display should be interesting.

Vyan

New York Times Endorses Kerry

John Kerry for President Published: October 17, 2004

Senator John Kerry goes toward the election with a base that is built more on opposition to George W. Bush than loyalty to his own candidacy. But over the last year we have come to know Mr. Kerry as more than just an alternative to the status quo. We like what we've seen. He has qualities that could be the basis for a great chief executive, not just a modest improvement on the incumbent.

We have been impressed with Mr. Kerry's wide knowledge and clear thinking - something that became more apparent once he was reined in by that two-minute debate light. He is blessedly willing to re-evaluate decisions when conditions change. And while Mr. Kerry's service in Vietnam was first over-promoted and then over-pilloried, his entire life has been devoted to public service, from the war to a series of elected offices. He strikes us, above all, as a man with a strong moral core.•

There is no denying that this race is mainly about Mr. Bush's disastrous tenure. Nearly four years ago, after the Supreme Court awarded him the presidency, Mr. Bush came into office amid popular expectation that he would acknowledge his lack of a mandate by sticking close to the center. Instead, he turned the government over to the radical right.

Mr. Bush installed John Ashcroft, a favorite of the far right with a history of insensitivity to civil liberties, as attorney general. He sent the Senate one ideological, activist judicial nominee after another. He moved quickly to implement a far-reaching anti-choice agenda including censorship of government Web sites and a clampdown on embryonic stem cell research. He threw the government's weight against efforts by the University of Michigan to give minority students an edge in admission, as it did for students from rural areas or the offspring of alumni.

When the nation fell into recession, the president remained fixated not on generating jobs but rather on fighting the right wing's war against taxing the wealthy. As a result, money that could have been used to strengthen Social Security evaporated, as did the chance to provide adequate funding for programs the president himself had backed. No Child Left Behind, his signature domestic program, imposed higher standards on local school systems without providing enough money to meet them.

If Mr. Bush had wanted to make a mark on an issue on which Republicans and Democrats have long made common cause, he could have picked the environment. Christie Whitman, the former New Jersey governor chosen to run the Environmental Protection Agency, came from that bipartisan tradition. Yet she left after three years of futile struggle against the ideologues and industry lobbyists Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had installed in every other important environmental post. The result has been a systematic weakening of regulatory safeguards across the entire spectrum of environmental issues, from clean air to wilderness protection. •

The president who lost the popular vote got a real mandate on Sept. 11, 2001. With the grieving country united behind him, Mr. Bush had an unparalleled opportunity to ask for almost any shared sacrifice. The only limit was his imagination.

He asked for another tax cut and the war against Iraq.

The president's refusal to drop his tax-cutting agenda when the nation was gearing up for war is perhaps the most shocking example of his inability to change his priorities in the face of drastically altered circumstances. Mr. Bush did not just starve the government of the money it needed for his own education initiative or the Medicare drug bill. He also made tax cuts a higher priority than doing what was needed for America's security; 90 percent of the cargo unloaded every day in the nation's ports still goes uninspected.

Along with the invasion of Afghanistan, which had near unanimous international and domestic support, Mr. Bush and his attorney general put in place a strategy for a domestic antiterror war that had all the hallmarks of the administration's normal method of doing business: a Nixonian obsession with secrecy, disrespect for civil liberties and inept management.

American citizens were detained for long periods without access to lawyers or family members. Immigrants were rounded up and forced to languish in what the Justice Department's own inspector general found were often "unduly harsh" conditions. Men captured in the Afghan war were held incommunicado with no right to challenge their confinement. The Justice Department became a cheerleader for skirting decades-old international laws and treaties forbidding the brutal treatment of prisoners taken during wartime.

Mr. Ashcroft appeared on TV time and again to announce sensational arrests of people who turned out to be either innocent, harmless braggarts or extremely low-level sympathizers of Osama bin Laden who, while perhaps wishing to do something terrible, lacked the means. The Justice Department cannot claim one major successful terrorism prosecution, and has squandered much of the trust and patience the American people freely gave in 2001. Other nations, perceiving that the vast bulk of the prisoners held for so long at Guantánamo Bay came from the same line of ineffectual incompetents or unlucky innocents, and seeing the awful photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, were shocked that the nation that was supposed to be setting the world standard for human rights could behave that way.•

Like the tax cuts, Mr. Bush's obsession with Saddam Hussein seemed closer to zealotry than mere policy. He sold the war to the American people, and to Congress, as an antiterrorist campaign even though Iraq had no known working relationship with Al Qaeda. His most frightening allegation was that Saddam Hussein was close to getting nuclear weapons. It was based on two pieces of evidence. One was a story about attempts to purchase critical materials from Niger, and it was the product of rumor and forgery. The other evidence, the purchase of aluminum tubes that the administration said were meant for a nuclear centrifuge, was concocted by one low-level analyst and had been thoroughly debunked by administration investigators and international vetting. Top members of the administration knew this, but the selling went on anyway. None of the president's chief advisers have ever been held accountable for their misrepresentations to the American people or for their mismanagement of the war that followed.

The international outrage over the American invasion is now joined by a sense of disdain for the incompetence of the effort. Moderate Arab leaders who have attempted to introduce a modicum of democracy are tainted by their connection to an administration that is now radioactive in the Muslim world. Heads of rogue states, including Iran and North Korea, have been taught decisively that the best protection against a pre-emptive American strike is to acquire nuclear weapons themselves. •

We have specific fears about what would happen in a second Bush term, particularly regarding the Supreme Court. The record so far gives us plenty of cause for worry. Thanks to Mr. Bush, Jay Bybee, the author of an infamous Justice Department memo justifying the use of torture as an interrogation technique, is now a federal appeals court judge. Another Bush selection, J. Leon Holmes, a federal judge in Arkansas, has written that wives must be subordinate to their husbands and compared abortion rights activists to Nazis.

Mr. Bush remains enamored of tax cuts but he has never stopped Republican lawmakers from passing massive spending, even for projects he dislikes, like increased farm aid.
If he wins re-election, domestic and foreign financial markets will know the fiscal recklessness will continue. Along with record trade imbalances, that increases the chances of a financial crisis, like an uncontrolled decline of the dollar, and higher long-term interest rates.

The Bush White House has always given us the worst aspects of the American right without any of the advantages. We get the radical goals but not the efficient management. The Department of Education's handling of the No Child Left Behind Act has been heavily politicized and inept. The Department of Homeland Security is famous for its useless alerts and its inability to distribute antiterrorism aid according to actual threats. Without providing enough troops to properly secure Iraq, the administration has managed to so strain the resources of our armed forces that
the nation is unprepared to respond to a crisis anywhere else in the world. •

Mr. Kerry has the capacity to do far, far better. He has a willingness - sorely missing in Washington these days - to reach across the aisle. We are relieved that he is a strong defender of civil rights, that he would remove unnecessary restrictions on stem cell research and that he understands the concept of separation of church and state. We appreciate his sensible plan to provide health coverage for most of the people who currently do without.

Mr. Kerry has an aggressive and in some cases innovative package of ideas about energy, aimed at addressing global warming and oil dependency. He is a longtime advocate of deficit reduction.

In the Senate, he worked with John McCain in restoring relations between the United States and Vietnam, and led investigations of the way the international financial system has been gamed to permit the laundering of drug and terror money. He has always understood that America's appropriate role in world affairs is as leader of a willing community of nations, not in my-way-or-the-highway domination.

We look back on the past four years with hearts nearly breaking, both for the lives unnecessarily lost and for the opportunities so casually wasted. Time and again, history invited George W. Bush to play a heroic role, and time and again he chose the wrong course. We believe that with John Kerry as president, the nation will do better.

Voting for president is a leap of faith. A candidate can explain his positions in minute detail and wind up governing with a hostile Congress that refuses to let him deliver. A disaster can upend the best-laid plans. All citizens can do is mix guesswork and hope, examining what the candidates have done in the past, their apparent priorities and their general character. It's on those three grounds that we enthusiastically endorse John Kerry for president

Without a Doubt: The Faith-Based Presidency

Go to Original

Without a Doubt
By Ron Suskind
The New York Times

Saturday 17 October 2004

Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, told me recently that "if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3. " The nature of that conflict, as Bartlett sees it? Essentially, the same as the one raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion.

(Photo: Kevin LaMarque / Reuters)

"Just in the past few months," Bartlett said, "I think a light has gone off for people who've spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he's always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do." Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush's governance, went on to say: "This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he's just like them. . . .

"This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts," Bartlett went on to say. "He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence." Bartlett paused, then said, "But you can't run the world on faith."

Forty democratic senators were gathered for a lunch in March just off the Senate floor. I was there as a guest speaker. Joe Biden was telling a story, a story about the president. "I was in the Oval Office a few months after we swept into Baghdad," he began, "and I was telling the president of my many concerns" - concerns about growing problems winning the peace, the explosive mix of Shiite and Sunni, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and problems securing the oil fields. Bush, Biden recalled, just looked at him, unflappably sure that the United States was on the right course and that all was well. "'Mr. President,' I finally said, 'How can you be so sure when you know you don't know the facts?"'

Biden said that Bush stood up and put his hand on the senator's shoulder. "My instincts," he said. "My instincts."

Biden paused and shook his head, recalling it all as the room grew quiet. "I said, 'Mr. President, your instincts aren't good enough!"'



The democrat Biden and the Republican Bartlett are trying to make sense of the same thing - a president who has been an extraordinary blend of forcefulness and inscrutability, opacity and action.

But lately, words and deeds are beginning to connect.

The Delaware senator was, in fact, hearing what Bush's top deputies - from cabinet members like Paul O'Neill, Christine Todd Whitman and Colin Powell to generals fighting in Iraq - have been told for years when they requested explanations for many of the president's decisions, policies that often seemed to collide with accepted facts. The president would say that he relied on his "gut" or his "instinct" to guide the ship of state, and then he "prayed over it." The old pro Bartlett, a deliberative, fact-based wonk, is finally hearing a tune that has been hummed quietly by evangelicals (so as not to trouble the secular) for years as they gazed upon President George W. Bush. This evangelical group - the core of the energetic "base" that may well usher Bush to victory - believes that their leader is a messenger from God. And in the first presidential debate, many Americans heard the discursive John Kerry succinctly raise, for the first time, the issue of Bush's certainty - the issue being, as Kerry put it, that "you can be certain and be wrong."

What underlies Bush's certainty? And can it be assessed in the temporal realm of informed consent?

All of this - the "gut" and "instincts," the certainty and religiosity -connects to a single word, "faith," and faith asserts its hold ever more on debates in this country and abroad. That a deep Christian faith illuminated the personal journey of George W. Bush is common knowledge. But faith has also shaped his presidency in profound, nonreligious ways. The president has demanded unquestioning faith from his followers, his staff, his senior aides and his kindred in the Republican Party. Once he makes a decision - often swiftly, based on a creed or moral position - he expects complete faith in its rightness.

The disdainful smirks and grimaces that many viewers were surprised to see in the first presidential debate are familiar expressions to those in the administration or in Congress who have simply asked the president to explain his positions. Since 9/11, those requests have grown scarce; Bush's intolerance of doubters has, if anything, increased, and few dare to question him now. A writ of infallibility - a premise beneath the powerful Bushian certainty that has, in many ways, moved mountains - is not just for public consumption: it has guided the inner life of the White House. As Whitman told me on the day in May 2003 that she announced her resignation as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency: "In meetings, I'd ask if there were any facts to support our case. And for that, I was accused of disloyalty!" (Whitman, whose faith in Bush has since been renewed, denies making these remarks and is now a leader of the president's re-election effort in New Jersey.)


The nation's founders, smarting still from the punitive pieties of Europe's state religions, were adamant about erecting a wall between organized religion and political authority. But suddenly, that seems like a long time ago. George W. Bush - both captive and creator of this moment - has steadily, inexorably, changed the office itself. He has created the faith-based presidency.

The faith-based presidency is a with-us-or-against-us model that has been enormously effective at, among other things, keeping the workings and temperament of the Bush White House a kind of state secret. The dome of silence cracked a bit in the late winter and spring, with revelations from the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke and also, in my book, from the former Bush treasury secretary Paul O'Neill. When I quoted O'Neill saying that Bush was like "a blind man in a room full of deaf people," this did not endear me to the White House. But my phone did begin to ring, with Democrats and Republicans calling with similar impressions and anecdotes about Bush's faith and certainty. These are among the sources I relied upon for this article. Few were willing to talk on the record. Some were willing to talk because they said they thought George W. Bush might lose; others, out of fear of what might transpire if he wins. In either case, there seems to be a growing silence fatigue - public servants, some with vast experience, who feel they have spent years being treated like Victorian-era children, seen but not heard, and are tired of it. But silence still reigns in the highest reaches of the White House. After many requests, Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, said in a letter that the president and those around him would not be cooperating with this article in any way.

Some officials, elected or otherwise, with whom I have spoken with left meetings in the Oval Office concerned that the president was struggling with the demands of the job. Others focused on Bush's substantial interpersonal gifts as a compensation for his perceived lack of broader capabilities. Still others, like Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, a Democrat, are worried about something other than his native intelligence. "He's plenty smart enough to do the job," Levin said. "It's his lack of curiosity about complex issues which troubles me." But more than anything else, I heard expressions of awe at the president's preternatural certainty and wonderment about its source.

There is one story about Bush's particular brand of certainty I am able to piece together and tell for the record.

In the Oval Office in December 2002, the president met with a few ranking senators and members of the House, both Republicans and Democrats. In those days, there were high hopes that the United States-sponsored "road map" for the Israelis and Palestinians would be a pathway to peace, and the discussion that wintry day was, in part, about countries providing peacekeeping forces in the region. The problem, everyone agreed, was that a number of European countries, like France and Germany, had armies that were not trusted by either the Israelis or Palestinians. One congressman - the Hungarian-born Tom Lantos, a Democrat from California and the only Holocaust survivor in Congress - mentioned that the Scandinavian countries were viewed more positively. Lantos went on to describe for the president how the Swedish Army might be an ideal candidate to anchor a small peacekeeping force on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Sweden has a well-trained force of about 25,000. The president looked at him appraisingly, several people in the room recall.

"I don't know why you're talking about Sweden," Bush said. "They're the neutral one. They don't have an army."

Lantos paused, a little shocked, and offered a gentlemanly reply: "Mr. President, you may have thought that I said Switzerland. They're the ones that are historically neutral, without an army." Then Lantos mentioned, in a gracious aside, that the Swiss do have a tough national guard to protect the country in the event of invasion.

Bush held to his view. "No, no, it's Sweden that has no army."

The room went silent, until someone changed the subject.

A few weeks later, members of Congress and their spouses gathered with administration officials and other dignitaries for the White House Christmas party. The president saw Lantos and grabbed him by the shoulder. "You were right," he said, with bonhomie. "Sweden does have an army."

This story was told to me by one of the senators in the Oval Office that December day, Joe Biden. Lantos, a liberal Democrat, would not comment about it. In general, people who meet with Bush will not discuss their encounters. (Lantos, through a spokesman, says it is a longstanding policy of his not to discuss Oval Office meetings.)

This is one key feature of the faith-based presidency: open dialogue, based on facts, is not seen as something of inherent value. It may, in fact, create doubt, which undercuts faith. It could result in a loss of confidence in the decision-maker and, just as important, by the decision-maker. Nothing could be more vital, whether staying on message with the voters or the terrorists or a California congressman in a meeting about one of the world's most nagging problems. As Bush himself has said any number of times on the campaign trail, "By remaining resolute and firm and strong, this world will be peaceful."


He didn't always talk this way. A precious glimpse of Bush, just as he was ascending to the presidency, comes from Jim Wallis, a man with the added advantage of having deep acuity about the struggles between fact and faith. Wallis, an evangelical pastor who for 30 years has run the Sojourners - a progressive organization of advocates for social justice - was asked during the transition to help pull together a diverse group of members of the clergy to talk about faith and poverty with the new president-elect.

In December 2000, Bush sat in the classroom of a Baptist church in Austin, Tex., with 30 or so clergy members and asked, "How do I speak to the soul of the nation?" He listened as each guest articulated a vision of what might be. The afternoon hours passed. No one wanted to leave. People rose from their chairs and wandered the room, huddling in groups, conversing passionately. In one cluster, Bush and Wallis talked of their journeys.

"I've never lived around poor people," Wallis remembers Bush saying. "I don't know what they think. I really don't know what they think. I'm a white Republican guy who doesn't get it. How do I get it?"

Wallis recalls replying, "You need to listen to the poor and those who live and work with poor people."

Bush called over his speechwriter, Michael Gerson, and said, "I want you to hear this." A month later, an almost identical line - "many in our country do not know the pain of poverty, but we can listen to those who do" - ended up in the inaugural address.

That was an earlier Bush, one rather more open and conversant, matching his impulsiveness with a can-do attitude and seemingly unafraid of engaging with a diverse group. The president has an array of interpersonal gifts that fit well with this fearlessness - a headlong, unalloyed quality, best suited to ranging among different types of people, searching for the outlines of what will take shape as principles.

Yet this strong suit, an improvisational gift, has long been forced to wrestle with its "left brain" opposite - a struggle, across 30 years, with the critical and analytical skills so prized in America's professional class. In terms of intellectual faculties, that has been the ongoing battle for this talented man, first visible during the lackluster years at Yale and five years of drift through his 20's - a time when peers were busy building credentials in law, business or medicine.

Biden, who early on became disenchanted with Bush's grasp of foreign-policy issues and is among John Kerry's closest Senate friends, has spent a lot of time trying to size up the president. "Most successful people are good at identifying, very early, their strengths and weaknesses, at knowing themselves," he told me not long ago. "For most of us average Joes, that meant we've relied on strengths but had to work on our weakness - to lift them to adequacy - otherwise they might bring us down. I don't think the president really had to do that, because he always had someone there - his family or friends - to bail him out. I don't think, on balance, that has served him well for the moment he's in now as president. He never seems to have worked on his weaknesses."

Bush has been called the C.E.O. president, but that's just a catch phrase - he never ran anything of consequence in the private sector. The M.B.A. president would be more accurate: he did, after all, graduate from Harvard Business School. And some who have worked under him in the White House and know about business have spotted a strange business-school time warp. It's as if a 1975 graduate from H.B.S. - one who had little chance to season theory with practice during the past few decades of change in corporate America - has simply been dropped into the most challenging management job in the world.

One aspect of the H.B.S. method, with its emphasis on problems of actual corporations, is sometimes referred to as the "case cracker" problem. The case studies are static, generally a snapshot of a troubled company, frozen in time; the various "solutions" students proffer, and then defend in class against tough questioning, tend to have very short shelf lives. They promote rigidity, inappropriate surety. This is something H.B.S. graduates, most of whom land at large or midsize firms, learn in their first few years in business. They discover, often to their surprise, that the world is dynamic, it flows and changes, often for no good reason. The key is flexibility, rather than sticking to your guns in a debate, and constant reassessment of shifting realities. In short, thoughtful second-guessing.

George W. Bush, who went off to Texas to be an oil wildcatter, never had a chance to learn these lessons about the power of nuanced, fact-based analysis. The small oil companies he ran tended to lose money; much of their value was as tax shelters. (The investors were often friends of his father's.) Later, with the Texas Rangers baseball team, he would act as an able front man but never really as a boss.

Instead of learning the limitations of his Harvard training, what George W. Bush learned instead during these fitful years were lessons about faith and its particular efficacy. It was in 1985, around the time of his 39th birthday, George W. Bush says, that his life took a sharp turn toward salvation. At that point he was drinking, his marriage was on the rocks, his career was listless. Several accounts have emerged from those close to Bush about a faith "intervention" of sorts at the Kennebunkport family compound that year. Details vary, but here's the gist of what I understand took place. George W., drunk at a party, crudely insulted a friend of his mother's. George senior and Barbara blew up. Words were exchanged along the lines of something having to be done. George senior, then the vice president, dialed up his friend, Billy Graham, who came to the compound and spent several days with George W. in probing exchanges and walks on the beach. George W. was soon born again. He stopped drinking, attended Bible study and wrestled with issues of fervent faith. A man who was lost was saved.

His marriage may have been repaired by the power of faith, but faith was clearly having little impact on his broken career. Faith heals the heart and the spirit, but it doesn't do much for analytical skills. In 1990, a few years after receiving salvation, Bush was still bumping along. Much is apparent from one of the few instances of disinterested testimony to come from this period. It is the voice of David Rubenstein, managing director and cofounder of the Carlyle Group, the Washington-based investment firm that is one of the town's most powerful institutions and a longtime business home for the president's father. In 1989, the catering division of Marriott was taken private and established as Caterair by a group of Carlyle investors. Several old-guard Republicans, including the former Nixon aide Fred Malek, were involved.

Rubenstein described that time to a convention of pension managers in Los Angeles last year, recalling that Malek approached him and said: "There is a guy who would like to be on the board. He's kind of down on his luck a bit. Needs a job. . . . Needs some board positions." Though Rubenstein didn't think George W. Bush, then in his mid-40's, "added much value," he put him on the Caterair board. "Came to all the meetings," Rubenstein told the conventioneers. "Told a lot of jokes. Not that many clean ones. And after a while I kind of said to him, after about three years: 'You know, I'm not sure this is really for you. Maybe you should do something else. Because I don't think you're adding that much value to the board. You don't know that much about the company.' He said: 'Well, I think I'm getting out of this business anyway. And I don't really like it that much. So I'm probably going to resign from the board.' And I said thanks. Didn't think I'd ever see him again."

Bush would soon officially resign from Caterair's board. Around this time, Karl Rove set up meetings to discuss Bush's possible candidacy for the governorship of Texas. Six years after that, he was elected leader of the free world and began "case cracking" on a dizzying array of subjects, proffering his various solutions, in both foreign and domestic affairs. But the pointed "defend your position" queries - so central to the H.B.S. method and rigorous analysis of all kinds - were infrequent. Questioning a regional supervisor or V.P. for planning is one thing. Questioning the president of the United States is another.

Still, some couldn't resist. As I reported in "The Price of Loyalty," at the Bush administration's first National Security Council meeting, Bush asked if anyone had ever met Ariel Sharon. Some were uncertain if it was a joke. It wasn't: Bush launched into a riff about briefly meeting Sharon two years before, how he wouldn't "go by past reputations when it comes to Sharon. . . . I'm going to take him at face value," and how the United States should pull out of the Arab-Israeli conflict because "I don't see much we can do over there at this point." Colin Powell, for one, seemed startled. This would reverse 30 years of policy - since the Nixon administration - of American engagement. Such a move would unleash Sharon, Powell countered, and tear the delicate fabric of the Mideast in ways that might be irreparable. Bush brushed aside Powell's concerns impatiently. "Sometimes a show of force by one side can really clarify things."

Such challenges - from either Powell or his opposite number as the top official in domestic policy, Paul O'Neill - were trials that Bush had less and less patience for as the months passed. He made that clear to his top lieutenants. Gradually, Bush lost what Richard Perle, who would later head a largely private-sector group under Bush called the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, had described as his open posture during foreign-policy tutorials prior to the 2000 campaign. ("He had the confidence to ask questions that revealed he didn't know very much," Perle said.) By midyear 2001, a stand-and-deliver rhythm was established. Meetings, large and small, started to take on a scripted quality. Even then, the circle around Bush was tightening. Top officials, from cabinet members on down, were often told when they would speak in Bush's presence, for how long and on what topic. The president would listen without betraying any reaction. Sometimes there would be cross-discussions - Powell and Rumsfeld, for instance, briefly parrying on an issue - but the president would rarely prod anyone with direct, informed questions.

Each administration, over the course of a term, is steadily shaped by its president, by his character, personality and priorities. It is a process that unfolds on many levels. There are, of course, a chief executive's policies, which are executed by a staff and attending bureaucracies. But a few months along, officials, top to bottom, will also start to adopt the boss's phraseology, his presumptions, his rhythms. If a president fishes, people buy poles; if he expresses displeasure, aides get busy finding evidence to support the judgment. A staff channels the leader.

A cluster of particularly vivid qualities was shaping George W. Bush's White House through the summer of 2001: a disdain for contemplation or deliberation, an embrace of decisiveness, a retreat from empiricism, a sometimes bullying impatience with doubters and even friendly questioners. Already Bush was saying, Have faith in me and my decisions, and you'll be rewarded. All through the White House, people were channeling the boss. He didn't second-guess himself; why should they?

Considering the trials that were soon to arrive, it is easy to overlook what a difficult time this must have been for George W. Bush. For nearly three decades, he had sat in classrooms, and then at mahogany tables in corporate suites, with little to contribute. Then, as governor of Texas, he was graced with a pliable enough bipartisan Legislature, and the Legislature is where the real work in that state's governance gets done. The Texas Legislature's tension of opposites offered the structure of point and counterpoint, which Bush could navigate effectively with his strong, improvisational skills.

But the mahogany tables were now in the Situation Room and in the large conference room adjacent to the Oval Office. He guided a ruling party. Every issue that entered that rarefied sanctum required a complex decision, demanding focus, thoroughness and analytical potency.

For the president, as Biden said, to be acutely aware of his weaknesses - and to have to worry about revealing uncertainty or need or confusion, even to senior officials - must have presented an untenable bind. By summer's end that first year, Vice President Dick Cheney had stopped talking in meetings he attended with Bush. They would talk privately, or at their weekly lunch. The president was spending a lot of time outside the White House, often at the ranch, in the presence of only the most trustworthy confidants. The circle around Bush is the tightest around any president in the modern era, and "it's both exclusive and exclusionary," Christopher DeMuth, president of the American Enterprise Institute, the neoconservative policy group, told me. "It's a too tightly managed decision-making process. When they make decisions, a very small number of people are in the room, and it has a certain effect of constricting the range of alternatives being offered."



On Sept. 11, 2001, the country watched intently to see if and how Bush would lead. After a couple of days in which he seemed shaky and uncertain, he emerged, and the moment he began to lead - standing on the World Trade Center's rubble with a bullhorn - for much of America, any lingering doubts about his abilities vanished. No one could afford doubt, not then. They wanted action, and George W. Bush was ready, having never felt the reasonable hesitations that slowed more deliberative men, and many presidents, including his father.

Within a few days of the attacks, Bush decided on the invasion of Afghanistan and was barking orders. His speech to the joint session of Congress on Sept. 20 will most likely be the greatest of his presidency. He prayed for God's help. And many Americans, of all faiths, prayed with him - or for him. It was simple and nondenominational: a prayer that he'd be up to this moment, so that he - and, by extension, we as a country - would triumph in that dark hour.

This is where the faith-based presidency truly takes shape. Faith, which for months had been coloring the decision-making process and a host of political tactics - think of his address to the nation on stem-cell research - now began to guide events. It was the most natural ascension: George W. Bush turning to faith in his darkest moment and discovering a wellspring of power and confidence.

Of course, the mandates of sound, sober analysis didn't vanish. They never do. Ask any entrepreneur with a blazing idea when, a few years along, the first debt payments start coming due. Or the C.E.O., certain that a high stock price affirms his sweeping vision, until that neglected, flagging division cripples the company. There's a startled look - how'd that happen? In this case, the challenge of mobilizing the various agencies of the United States government and making certain that agreed-upon goals become demonstrable outcomes grew exponentially.

Looking back at the months directly following 9/11, virtually every leading military analyst seems to believe that rather than using Afghan proxies, we should have used more American troops, deployed more quickly, to pursue Osama bin Laden in the mountains of Tora Bora. Many have also been critical of the president's handling of Saudi Arabia, home to 15 of the 19 hijackers; despite Bush's setting goals in the so-called "financial war on terror," the Saudis failed to cooperate with American officials in hunting for the financial sources of terror. Still, the nation wanted bold action and was delighted to get it. Bush's approval rating approached 90 percent. Meanwhile, the executive's balance between analysis and resolution, between contemplation and action, was being tipped by the pull of righteous faith.

It was during a press conference on Sept. 16, in response to a question about homeland security efforts infringing on civil rights, that Bush first used the telltale word "crusade" in public. "This is a new kind of - a new kind of evil," he said. "And we understand. And the American people are beginning to understand. This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while."

Muslims around the world were incensed. Two days later, Ari Fleischer tried to perform damage control. "I think what the president was saying was - had no intended consequences for anybody, Muslim or otherwise, other than to say that this is a broad cause that he is calling on America and the nations around the world to join." As to "any connotations that would upset any of our partners, or anybody else in the world, the president would regret if anything like that was conveyed."

A few months later, on Feb. 1, 2002, Jim Wallis of the Sojourners stood in the Roosevelt Room for the introduction of Jim Towey as head of the president's faith-based and community initiative. John DiIulio, the original head, had left the job feeling that the initiative was not about "compassionate conservatism," as originally promised, but rather a political giveaway to the Christian right, a way to consolidate and energize that part of the base.

Moments after the ceremony, Bush saw Wallis. He bounded over and grabbed the cheeks of his face, one in each hand, and squeezed. "Jim, how ya doin', how ya doin'!" he exclaimed. Wallis was taken aback. Bush excitedly said that his massage therapist had given him Wallis's book, "Faith Works." His joy at seeing Wallis, as Wallis and others remember it, was palpable - a president, wrestling with faith and its role at a time of peril, seeing that rare bird: an independent counselor. Wallis recalls telling Bush he was doing fine, "'but in the State of the Union address a few days before, you said that unless we devote all our energies, our focus, our resources on this war on terrorism, we're going to lose.' I said, 'Mr. President, if we don't devote our energy, our focus and our time on also overcoming global poverty and desperation, we will lose not only the war on poverty, but we'll lose the war on terrorism."'

Bush replied that that was why America needed the leadership of Wallis and other members of the clergy.

"No, Mr. President," Wallis says he told Bush, "We need your leadership on this question, and all of us will then commit to support you. Unless we drain the swamp of injustice in which the mosquitoes of terrorism breed, we'll never defeat the threat of terrorism."

Bush looked quizzically at the minister, Wallis recalls. They never spoke again after that.

"When I was first with Bush in Austin, what I saw was a self-help Methodist, very open, seeking," Wallis says now. "What I started to see at this point was the man that would emerge over the next year - a messianic American Calvinist. He doesn't want to hear from anyone who doubts him."

But with a country crying out for intrepid leadership, does a president have time to entertain doubters? In a speech in Alaska two weeks later, Bush again referred to the war on terror as a "crusade."

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend - but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Who besides guys like me are part of the reality-based community? Many of the other elected officials in Washington, it would seem. A group of Democratic and Republican members of Congress were called in to discuss Iraq sometime before the October 2002 vote authorizing Bush to move forward. A Republican senator recently told Time Magazine that the president walked in and said: "Look, I want your vote. I'm not going to debate it with you." When one of the senators began to ask a question, Bush snapped, "Look, I'm not going to debate it with you."

The 9/11 commission did not directly address the question of whether Bush exerted influence over the intelligence community about the existence of weapons of mass destruction. That question will be investigated after the election, but if no tangible evidence of undue pressure is found, few officials or alumni of the administration whom I spoke to are likely to be surprised. "If you operate in a certain way - by saying this is how I want to justify what I've already decided to do, and I don't care how you pull it off - you guarantee that you'll get faulty, one-sided information," Paul O'Neill, who was asked to resign his post of treasury secretary in December 2002, said when we had dinner a few weeks ago. "You don't have to issue an edict, or twist arms, or be overt."

In a way, the president got what he wanted: a National Intelligence Estimate on W.M.D. that creatively marshaled a few thin facts, and then Colin Powell putting his credibility on the line at the United Nations in a show of faith. That was enough for George W. Bush to press forward and invade Iraq. As he told his quasi-memoirist, Bob Woodward, in "Plan of Attack": "Going into this period, I was praying for strength to do the Lord's will. . . . I'm surely not going to justify the war based upon God. Understand that. Nevertheless, in my case, I pray to be as good a messenger of his will as possible."

Machiavelli's oft-cited line about the adequacy of the perception of power prompts a question. Is the appearance of confidence as important as its possession? Can confidence - true confidence - be willed? Or must it be earned?

George W. Bush, clearly, is one of history's great confidence men. That is not meant in the huckster's sense, though many critics claim that on the war in Iraq, the economy and a few other matters he has engaged in some manner of bait-and-switch. No, I mean it in the sense that he's a believer in the power of confidence. At a time when constituents are uneasy and enemies are probing for weaknesses, he clearly feels that unflinching confidence has an almost mystical power. It can all but create reality.



Whether you can run the world on faith, it's clear you can run one hell of a campaign on it.

George W. Bush and his team have constructed a high-performance electoral engine. The soul of this new machine is the support of millions of likely voters, who judge his worth based on intangibles - character, certainty, fortitude and godliness - rather than on what he says or does. The deeper the darkness, the brighter this filament of faith glows, a faith in the president and the just God who affirms him.

The leader of the free world is clearly comfortable with this calculus and artfully encourages it. In the series of televised, carefully choreographed "Ask President Bush" events with supporters around the country, sessions filled with prayers and blessings, one questioner recently summed up the feelings of so many Christian conservatives, the core of the Bush army. "I've voted Republican from the very first time I could vote," said Gary Walby, a retired jeweler from Destin, Fla., as he stood before the president in a crowded college gym. "And I also want to say this is the very first time that I have felt that God was in the White House." Bush simply said "thank you" as a wave of raucous applause rose from the assembled.

Every few months, a report surfaces of the president using strikingly Messianic language, only to be dismissed by the White House. Three months ago, for instance, in a private meeting with Amish farmers in Lancaster County, Pa., Bush was reported to have said, "I trust God speaks through me." In this ongoing game of winks and nods, a White House spokesman denied the president had specifically spoken those words, but noted that "his faith helps him in his service to people."

A recent Gallup Poll noted that 42 percent of Americans identify themselves as evangelical or "born again." While this group leans Republican, it includes black urban churches and is far from monolithic. But Bush clearly draws his most ardent supporters and tireless workers from this group, many from a healthy subset of approximately four million evangelicals who didn't vote in 2000 - potential new arrivals to the voting booth who could tip a close election or push a tight contest toward a rout.

This signaling system - forceful, national, varied, yet clean of the president's specific fingerprint - carries enormous weight. Lincoln Chafee, the moderate Republican senator from Rhode Island, has broken with the president precisely over concerns about the nature of Bush's certainty. "This issue," he says, of Bush's "announcing that 'I carry the word of God' is the key to the election. The president wants to signal to the base with that message, but in the swing states he does not."

Come to the hostings on Labor Day and meet the base. In 2004, you know a candidate by his base, and the Bush campaign is harnessing the might of churches, with hordes of voters registering through church-sponsored programs. Following the news of Bush on his national tour in the week after the Republican convention, you could sense how a faith-based president campaigns: on a surf of prayer and righteous rage.

Righteous rage - that's what Hardy Billington felt when he heard about same-sex marriage possibly being made legal in Massachusetts. "It made me upset and disgusted, things going on in Massachusetts," the 52-year-old from Poplar Bluff, Mo., told me. "I prayed, then I got to work." Billington spent $830 in early July to put up a billboard on the edge of town. It read: "I Support President Bush and the Men and Women Fighting for Our Country. We Invite President Bush to Visit Poplar Bluff." Soon Billington and his friend David Hahn, a fundamentalist preacher, started a petition drive. They gathered 10,000 signatures. That fact eventually reached the White House scheduling office.

By late afternoon on a cloudy Labor Day, with a crowd of more than 20,000 assembled in a public park, Billington stepped to the podium. "The largest group I ever talked to I think was seven people, and I'm not much of a talker," Billington, a shy man with three kids and a couple of dozen rental properties that he owns, told me several days later. "I've never been so frightened."

But Billington said he "looked to God" and said what was in his heart. "The United States is the greatest country in the world," he told the rally. "President Bush is the greatest president I have ever known. I love my president. I love my country. And more important, I love Jesus Christ."

The crowd went wild, and they went wild again when the president finally arrived and gave his stump speech. There were Bush's periodic stumbles and gaffes, but for the followers of the faith-based president, that was just fine. They got it - and "it" was the faith.

And for those who don't get it? That was explained to me in late 2002 by Mark McKinnon, a longtime senior media adviser to Bush, who now runs his own consulting firm and helps the president. He started by challenging me. "You think he's an idiot, don't you?" I said, no, I didn't. "No, you do, all of you do, up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few blocks in southern Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue you in. We don't care. You see, you're outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don't read The New York Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it's good for us. Because you know what those folks don't like? They don't like you!" In this instance, the final "you," of course, meant the entire reality-based community.

The bond between Bush and his base is a bond of mutual support. He supports them with his actions, doing his level best to stand firm on wedge issues like abortion and same-sex marriage while he identifies evil in the world, at home and abroad. They respond with fierce faith. The power of this transaction is something that people, especially those who are religious, tend to connect to their own lives. If you have faith in someone, that person is filled like a vessel. Your faith is the wind beneath his or her wings. That person may well rise to the occasion and surprise you: I had faith in you, and my faith was rewarded. Or, I know you've been struggling, and I need to pray harder.

Bush's speech that day in Poplar Bluff finished with a mythic appeal: "For all Americans, these years in our history will always stand apart," he said. "You know, there are quiet times in the life of a nation when little is expected of its leaders. This isn't one of those times. This is a time that needs - when we need firm resolve and clear vision and a deep faith in the values that make us a great nation."

The life of the nation and the life of Bush effortlessly merge - his fortitude, even in the face of doubters, is that of the nation; his ordinariness, like theirs, is heroic; his resolve, to whatever end, will turn the wheel of history.

Remember, this is consent, informed by the heart and by the spirit. In the end, Bush doesn't have to say he's ordained by God. After a day of speeches by Hardy Billington and others, it goes without saying.

"To me, I just believe God controls everything, and God uses the president to keep evil down, to see the darkness and protect this nation," Billington told me, voicing an idea shared by millions of Bush supporters. "Other people will not protect us. God gives people choices to make. God gave us this president to be the man to protect the nation at this time."

But when the moment came in the V.I.P. tent to shake Bush's hand, Billington remembered being reserved. "'I really thank God that you're the president' was all I told him." Bush, he recalled, said, "Thank you."

"He knew what I meant," Billington said. "I believe he's an instrument of God, but I have to be careful about what I say, you know, in public."

Is there anyone in America who feels that John Kerry is an instrument of God?



"I'm going to be real positive, while I keep my foot on John Kerry's throat," George W. Bush said last month at a confidential luncheon a block away from the White House with a hundred or so of his most ardent, longtime supporters, the so-called R.N.C. Regents. This was a high-rolling crowd - at one time or another, they had all given large contributions to Bush or the Republican National Committee. Bush had known many of them for years, and a number of them had visited him at the ranch. It was a long way from Poplar Bluff.

The Bush these supporters heard was a triumphal Bush, actively beginning to plan his second term. It is a second term, should it come to pass, that will alter American life in many ways, if predictions that Bush voiced at the luncheon come true.

He said emphatically that he expects the Republicans will gain seats to expand their control of the House and the Senate. According to notes provided to me, and according to several guests at the lunch who agreed to speak about what they heard, he said that "Osama bin Laden would like to overthrow the Saudis . . .

then we're in trouble. Because they have a weapon. They have the oil." He said that there will be an opportunity to appoint a Supreme Court justice shortly after his inauguration, and perhaps three more high-court vacancies during his second term.

"Won't that be amazing?" said Peter Stent, a rancher and conservationist who attended the luncheon. "Can you imagine? Four appointments!"

After his remarks, Bush opened it up for questions, and someone asked what he's going to do about energy policy with worldwide oil reserves predicted to peak.

Bush said: "I'm going to push nuclear energy, drilling in Alaska and clean coal. Some nuclear-fusion technologies are interesting." He mentions energy from "processing corn."

"I'm going to bring all this up in the debate, and I'm going to push it," he said, and then tried out a line. "Do you realize that ANWR [the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge] is the size of South Carolina, and where we want to drill is the size of the Columbia airport?"

The questions came from many directions - respectful, but clearly reality-based. About the deficits, he said he'd "spend whatever it takes to protect our kids in Iraq," that "homeland security cost more than I originally thought."

In response to a question, he talked about diversity, saying that "hands down," he has the most diverse senior staff in terms of both gender and race. He recalled a meeting with Chancellor Gerhard Schroder of Germany. "You know, I'm sitting there with Schroder one day with Colin and Condi. And I'm thinking: What's Schroder thinking?! He's sitting here with two blacks and one's a woman."

But as the hour passed, Bush kept coming back to the thing most on his mind: his second term.

"I'm going to come out strong after my swearing in," Bush said, "with fundamental tax reform, tort reform, privatizing of Social Security." The victories he expects in November, he said, will give us "two years, at least, until the next midterm. We have to move quickly, because after that I'll be quacking like a duck."

Joseph Gildenhorn, a top contributor who attended the luncheon and has been invited to visit Bush at his ranch, said later: "I've never seen the president so ebullient. He was so confident. He feels so strongly he will win." Yet one part of Bush's 60-odd-minute free-form riff gave Gildenhorn - a board member of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and a former ambassador to Switzerland - a moment's pause. The president, listing priorities for his second term, placed near the top of his agenda the expansion of federal support for faith-based institutions. The president talked at length about giving the initiative the full measure of his devotion and said that questions about separation of church and state were not an issue.

Talk of the faith-based initiative, Gildenhorn said, makes him "a little uneasy." Many conservative evangelicals "feel they have a direct line from God," he said, and feel Bush is divinely chosen.

"I think he's religious, I think he's a born-again, I don't think, though, that he feels that he's been ordained by God to serve the country." Gildenhorn paused, then said, "But you know, I really haven't discussed it with him."

A regent I spoke to later and who asked not to be identified told me: "I'm happy he's certain of victory and that he's ready to burst forth into his second term, but it all makes me a little nervous. There are a lot of big things that he's planning to do domestically, and who knows what countries we might invade or what might happen in Iraq. But when it gets complex, he seems to turn to prayer or God rather than digging in and thinking things through. What's that line? - the devil's in the details. If you don't go after that devil, he'll come after you."



Bush grew into one of history's most forceful leaders, his admirers will attest, by replacing hesitation and reasonable doubt with faith and clarity. Many more will surely tap this high-voltage connection of fervent faith and bold action. In politics, the saying goes, anything that works must be repeated until it is replaced by something better. The horizon seems clear of competitors.

Can the unfinished American experiment in self-governance - sputtering on the watery fuel of illusion and assertion - deal with something as nuanced as the subtleties of one man's faith? What, after all, is the nature of the particular conversation the president feels he has with God - a colloquy upon which the world now precariously turns?

That very issue is what Jim Wallis wishes he could sit and talk about with George W. Bush. That's impossible now, he says. He is no longer invited to the White House.

"Faith can cut in so many ways," he said. "If you're penitent and not triumphal, it can move us to repentance and accountability and help us reach for something higher than ourselves. That can be a powerful thing, a thing that moves us beyond politics as usual, like Martin Luther King did. But when it's designed to certify our righteousness - that can be a dangerous thing. Then it pushes self-criticism aside. There's no reflection.

"Where people often get lost is on this very point," he said after a moment of thought. "Real faith, you see, leads us to deeper reflection and not - not ever - to the thing we as humans so very much want."

And what is that?

"Easy certainty."

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Ron Suskind was the senior national-affairs reporter for The Wall Street Journal from 1993 to 2000. He is the author most recently of "The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O'Neill."