Bush's Patriotic Challenge

...every idea he expresses is infused with moral purpose...

...He is the opposite of a wonk, an economic determinist, or a realist diplomat...

...This was Bush celebrating the nurturing virtues, rallying the armies of compassion...

...He called upon America to shape the world—"This country will define our times, not be defined by them...

...Many of the analyses of cultural rot were overdrawn, and the social issues will simply not top the agenda over the next months or years...

...President Bush will have to explain what America is fighting for, and why this effort is not just a case of a big power pushing around a little power...

...Bipartisanship is a fact, and not just an aim...

...Finally, Bush will have to rally the party of patriotism on domestic as well as foreign issues...

...Most Americans understand that the sacrifices that will be required have nothing to do with economic self-interest or the invisible hand...

...The war would be waged in cyberspace, he wrote...

...Well, the time of blessing ended on September 11, and compassionate conservatism will not define the Bush presidency...

...Conservatives like Grover Norquist are now lobbying against Bush legislation...

...If there's one thing we learned it's that New Yorkers are capable of great acts of patriotism and heroism, no matter how they vote or where they stand on issues like homosexuality and abortion...

...The Democratic party has rediscovered the hawkish legacy of Scoop Jackson...

...And it really is new...

...All around him, there are people consumed with a million and one parochial concerns and distractions...

...The third great change is in the nature of the president's base, his domestic coalition...

...In any case, religion is both too grand and too sectarian to make the basis for the coming struggle...

...President Bush was in that tradition when he declared, "Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists...

...He'll have to explain to the world why America is fighting so hard and so ruthlessly...

...The second big change is that this will be an era defined by foreign conflict, not domestic conciliation or "changing the tone," as Bush used to put it...

...President Bush didn't plan to have a rhetorical presidency, but it will now be incumbent upon him to give intellectual content to the love of country that is so conspicuous these days...

...He immediately cast this war on terrorism as a great moral struggle...

...The American public will revile those who treat New York as a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah...

...Those groups are the core of the Republican party...

...The budget hawks have been weakened...

...The country's most prominent Republicans suddenly include Tom Ridge and Rudy Giuliani...

...A few seemed to fear the U.S...

...The first big change in Bush is in the scale of his thinking...

...There were slogans like "Prosperity With a Purpose" and "The People Versus the Powerful...

...Now Bush's task is to keep the government's focus on the main goal: destroying terrorism...

...But as a saint of our times has said, every day we are called to do small things with great love...

...Burke said that our love of little platoons is but "the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love of our country and to mankind...

...Before, the president's main job was to seek common ground so he could pass his education, patients' bill of rights, and faith-based initiatives...

...the real answer is to fund a Marshall Plan here, there, and everywhere...

...Granny D. marching for campaign finance reform at Arianna Huffington's Shadow Convention...

...Now we remember that America is a cause and not just a free trade zone, and that the American people are fundamentally united, not divided...

...Before, he was thinking like a governor...

...There is certainly no going back...

...These days Bush is summoning not just the armies of compassion, but also real armies...

...The Founders designed the presidency so that the person who holds the office will have the highest vantage point, and be able to see the entire field, and so separate parochial distractions from the essential goal...

...It wasn't that long ago when important parts of the Republican party were consumed by a visceral hatred of all things federal...

...Bush will also have to respond to all the domestic "moderates" who, while not siding with the terrorists, have rediscovered the old Cold War arguments for nonintervention: We don't want to ratchet up the cycle of violence...

...Chaka Khan closing the show at the ultra-inclusive Republican convention...

...Bush was elevated to office by an alliance of two movements: social conservatives and free-market economic conservatives...

...It's not so much that it's silly—though it led us to base our intelligence strategy on high-tech satellites—it's just that it's a tempting retreat from the difficult but necessary business of eliminating the human beings who organize terror...

...and issues like lockboxes, Internet invention, and so on...

...The categories of Bush's thought, before the attack and after, are shaped by his faith...

...Now, in response to the attack, he is thinking like a president, as the leader of a superpower...

...It's becoming quite clear that this war effort will fundamentally alter the political landscape, perhaps as dramatically as Vietnam did, bringing new issues to the fore, new coalitions, new correlations of forces...

...The most striking feature of Bush's speech to the joint session of Congress was its strenuous tone...

...by class-resentment liberals and corporatist conservatives, who treated economic issues as if they were paramount...

...Washington was a swamp, a muck of "inside the Beltway" operators...

...The entire 2000 presidential campaign was predicated on peace and prosperity...

...And so we have entered a new political era...

...Nobody is going to be in the mood for a domestic culture war anytime soon...

...There will be relentless pressure to pull back from the ambitious set of goals the president has laid out...

...would be defined not by war, but by its ability to rebuild families and communities...

...Bush went on to say that his own boomer generation David Brooks is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...This was the language of compassionate conservatism...

...Now his emphasis is on not the local, but the global...

...But times of conflict don't allow the luxury of fatuous populism...

...Sometimes in life we are called to do great things...

...The World War II generation was, the younger Bush declared, "a generation of Americans who stormed beaches, liberated concentration camps, and delivered us from evil...

...He'll have to rally them with words...

...Some social conservatives reacted badly to the attack on September 11...

...Bush cited Mary Jo Copeland, whose ministry, Sharing and Caring Hands, serves meals to the homeless...

...How should we take advantage of the good times...

...Responding to those arguments will take ideological self-confidence, a concrete understanding of the American ideal that is under attack...

...In any case, few sensible Americans and few sensible free marketeers will be sympathetic to people who denigrate public service and a vigorous federal response to the attack...

...we have to concede that the people who hate us have a point...

...We must show courage in a time of blessing," Bush said in his inaugural address...

...George W. Bush cannot call on explicitly Christian language because it excludes too many who are full partners in this effort...

...Indeed, the most powerful line in his post-attack speech to the Congress was, "And in our grief and anger we have found our mission and our moment...

...The president has already demonstrated that he has a new role...

...When a big, rich country attacks a poor little one, some will call it imperialism...

...Some free marketeers also reacted badly to the attack on September 11...

...There were in fact echoes of Theodore Roosevelt's famous 1899 speech "The Strenuous Life": "We of this generation do not have to face a task such as that our fathers faced, but we have our tasks and woe to us if we fail to perform them," TR declared...

...At the National Cathedral, Bush said the nation's task was to "rid the world of evil...

...Somebody once said that Americans don't ever settle their great issues, they just move beyond them...

...Since September 11, we have moved beyond many of the issues that dominated the 1990s, and so far President Bush has done a good job of greeting the new political era that awaits us...

...Lincoln was continually forced to urge his generals to be more aggressive...

...The secretary of state has to contend with the intricacies of all those alliances, dialogues, and negotiations...

...Meanwhile, the secretary of defense will have his own rivalries and institutional incentives to deal with...

...During the peace and prosperity of the 1990s, political debate was dominated by multiculturalists, who divided us along race and gender lines...

...we have to understand the seedbed of terror is poverty...

...At the National Cathedral he effectively amended his convention speech, saying that each genera-tion—and not just the World War II one—is called upon to fight for freedom, "and the commitment of our fathers is now the calling of our time...

...Back at the Republican convention, Bush spoke about how his father's generation had been called to wage an epic struggle for freedom...

...Wartime presidents have to perpetually remind those around them of the core mission...

...Nobody has grasped the dramatic change as quickly as George W. Bush...

...Once a president has committed himself to that grand agenda, he can't go back and settle for a managerial presidency with small accomplishments...

...But Bush will have to make sure that wartime activism is more like the Civil War activism that brought us the Homestead Act, the Land Grant College Act, and other measures designed to encourage competition and enterprise than it is like Vietnam War activism, which brought us the Great Society...

...The bureaucrats will try to remove Iraq, Hezbollah, Hamas, and others from the target list so as to make their job of maintaining alliance cohesion easier...

...by culture warriors, who divided us on moral lines...

...The uniforms would be "bankers' pinstripes and programmers' grunge just as assuredly as desert camouflage...

...Whatever virtue privatization may have when it comes to Social Security reform, the response to terror can't be privatized...

...Inevitably, his bureaucracy is going to behave as if coalition-building were more important than destroying terror...

...He defined the enemy broadly, to include not only Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, but the regimes that support them and other terrorist networks of global reach...

...The nation's greatness, he said, would be preserved through "small, unnumbered acts of caring and courage and self-denial...

...This is the sort of high-tech infatuation we often see emanating from that bureaucracy...

...It would look too much like retreat...

...The emphasis was on "small"—the local, the intimate...

...Recall that at the convention he celebrated his father's generation for having "delivered us from evil...

...He effectively called for the rollback of rogue regimes that nurture the violent enemies of peace and freedom...

...government, and its possible growth, more than the foreign terrorists...

...Last week, for example, Secretary Rumsfeld wrote an op-ed for the New York Times, the last half of which read as if it had been conceived by dot-com executives, circa 1997...

...It is on not intimate acts of caring, but large exercises in defense of freedom...

...They all seem so far away now—and they are...

...Bush, in turn, called on his listeners to accept a great patriotic challenge, which would take time and cost lives...

...There is a demand for activism, as there always is during wartime...

...Government was described as "evil...

...So instead of merely celebrating faith-based organizations, or summoning forth the entrepreneurial spirit, President Bush will now have to rally the party of patriotism, which is the massive majority who are waving flags and telling pollsters they are ready for a long, costly effort...

...His emphasis was on the local, on the little platoons...

...The issues that dominated the race for the presidency will not dominate this presidency...

...He is speaking as an energetic chief executive...

...But they are insufficient to see the president through the coming months and years...

...In his responses to the attack, Bush has, at once, been utterly consistent with his former self, and also totally transformed...

...There is still the same moral earnestness...

...They understand that the economic mentality, which holds that all behavior is a question of incentives, cannot explain the Taliban, and offers no language with which to respond to it...

...Elevated to the highest office, and having assumed the responsibilities of that office, Bush has now traced the links upward...

...The reports coming out of the White House suggest that Bush truly understands how the attack has changed his presidency and will define his term...

...He feels that he was put on earth to help the nation respond to this crisis, some of his aides say...

...But now peace is gone and prosperity is ailing...

...That was exactly the sort of clarity a president in such an era must provide...

...America does not fight holy wars...