THE purpose of last night's presidential press conference was to show purpose, and rarely has a president seemed quite so purposeful as George W. Bush did last night.
The purpose of the White House press corps was to make the president confess to weakness - to corner him into creating the soundbite of all soundbites, in which Bush would acknowledge his errors as president and thereby give John Kerry all the material he would need for a killer TV ad or two.
The president achieved his purpose. The press corps did not achieve its purpose. He would not fall into their astonishingly blatant trap. He simply refused to offer a satisfactory answer to four - four! - different questions demanding that he either enumerate or apologize for his failures.
No one should be fooled by the way he stumbled through some of his answers about his mistakes as president. Bush knew exactly what he was doing, as he always does.
Rather than apologize to the 9/11 families for the terror strike that day, the president said the responsibility for the attacks rested squarely on the shoulders of Osama bin Laden. And it's a mark of how demented the debate has gotten in the past few weeks that this simple statement of truth seemed bracing and even daring.
The purposeful Bush sought to reassure the American people that the cost and the burden of the mission in Iraq are worth it - and that the sacrifices being borne by our military and their families are noble and valuable.
"One of the things that's very important," he said, "is to never allow our youngsters to die in vain. And I made that pledge to their parents. Withdrawing from the battlefield of Iraq would be just that, and it's not going to happen under my watch."
The sacrifices are being made for freedom - and for American security. He said it plainly and simply: "By helping secure a free Iraq, Americans serving in that country are protecting their fellow citizens. Our nation is grateful to them all and to their families that face hardship and long separation."
The fighting in Iraq is self-evidently part of the War on Terror, he said, because those who are trying to kill soldiers and contractors in Iraq use the same tactics as the terrorists who kill everywhere - and for the same reasons.
"The terrorists who take hostages or plants a roadside bomb near Baghdad," he said, are "serving the same ideology of murder that kills innocent people on trains in Madrid, and murders children on buses in Jerusalem, and blows up a nightclub in Bali and cuts the throat of a young reporter for being a Jew."
[This was the first critical thing the president said. Very powerful.--Jen]
In the president's formulation, the mission in Iraq is not only noble and valuable, but now inescapable. There are only two possible outcomes, he said: "Iraq will either be a peaceful, democratic country or it will again be a source of violence, a haven for terror and a threat to America and to the world."
[These are the stakes. No more and no less.--J.T.]
As a result, the United States cannot fail in Iraq "because the consequences of failure would be unthinkable." Failure will embolden terrorists and purveyors of violence, who "would celebrate, proclaiming our weakness and decadence, and using that victory to recruit a new generation of killers."
[This was the second important point Bush made, which completely explains why we must fight and why that fight is here and now and in Iraq.]
Bush's purposefulness was also on display in answering those who demand a delay in the sovereignty schedule. There will, he said, be a handover of sovereignty to an interim Iraqi authority on June 30.
"Were the Coalition to step back from the June 30th pledge, many Iraqis would question our intentions and feel their hopes betrayed," he said. "And those in Iraq who trade in hatred and conspiracy theories would find a larger audience and gain a stronger hand. We will not step back from our pledge."
This is a presidency with a purpose. It will be up to the American people whether this purpose is worth giving George W. Bush a second term. "I look forward to making my case," he said. "I'm looking forward to the campaign."
Judging from his stout rhetoric and surpassingly clever gamesmanship with a scalp-hungry press corps last night, Bush has every reason to.
As his father President Bush 41 did, President Bush 43, the son, asks us to "Stay the course."
I, for one, am with him.
Home
