McCain’s propensity to lie has become what political junkies call a meme, an idea or behavior that runs, seemingly unstoppably, from one media outlet to another. Some bloggers offer daily counts of how many falsehoods McCain tells while others wonder why the Democrats do not respond in turn. Even the mainstream press has gotten into the act. One of the pleasures of the 2008 campaign — I admit they have been few and far between — is watching all those who once admired John McCain for his truthfulness realize the true depths of his moral depravity. When McCain is linked to Palin, moreover, as he so frequently wants to be, lying experiences something of a multiplier effect. These candidates lie so much that they have taken to lying about their own lies.

Before we get carried away with enthusiasm about all this, though, we should keep two things in mind. One is that we are so quick to label McCain a liar that we tend to forget how much, and with what horrendous consequences, George W. Bush possessed the same character flaw. The other is that Republicans lie so frequently, not because the party just happened to settle upon one serial liar after another to run for high office, but because the form of conservatism to which they all adhere demands that if they are to win they have no choice but to lie.

In the 2000 presidential election, George W. Bush, then something of a political unknown, claimed to be a compassionate conservative and promised the country a “humble” foreign policy. Lies both. Compassionate conservatism was a brilliant campaign slogan, an attempt by Bush to persuade independent voters that he was not a raving madman like Newt Gingrich, who had urged, in true Dickensian fashion, the building of orphanages to solve the welfare problem. Long before the public had ever heard of Rick Warren, Karl Rove understood that the evangelical base of the Republican Party wanted language more uplifting than traditional Republican red meat, and the idea that conservatives were in fact more compassionate than bureaucratic liberals provided it. In actuality, as we now know, Bush wanted to privatize Social Security, the most compassionate program ever adopted in this country, and was simply waiting for the right opportunity to do so.

Bush spoke in 2000 of a humble foreign policy for much the same reason. We now also know that the Bush-Cheney administration was intent on adopting the most aggressive American foreign stance possible, and that the events of Sept. 11, 2001, offered them the public justification for actions they had been secretly planning since taking office. We tend to forget that before Sept. 11, aggressive foreign policy moves were not all that popular. Americans wanted a peace dividend in the aftermath of communism’s collapse and seemed hell-bent on turning inward to their private pursuits. In that context, offering them a humble approach while planning a militant one constituted as dramatic a lie as one can imagine.

I would never challenge the argument that John McCain’s lies in 2008 are over the top. But if McCain is more serial a liar than George W. Bush, it is a matter of degree rather than kind. Bush’s lies, after all, led to thousands of needless deaths, and none of John McCain’s lies, at least to this point, have done that. Were he to find himself elected, McCain would no doubt lie about many things, such as whether the United States has engaged in torture or whether Iran is a genuine military threat to the United States. But the bar has been set way too high; given the mendacity of the Bush administration, I am at something of a loss to imagine that a McCain administration could lie more.

Why do Republicans lie so much? Why is McCain following the Bush script? Why, at the very moment when he wanted a “maverick” by his side, did McCain pick a congenital liar to be his running mate? Republicans engage in what I can only call “structural lies.” To understand what this means consider this: Just about every significant lie uttered by Republican politicians is designed to make them seem less conservative than they really are.

The current lie du jour of the McCain campaign is that their man will aggressively take on the greed that is causing the collapse on Wall Street. Given McCain’s lack of interest in the economy, wealthy campaign contributors, and ideological hostility toward government regulation, this stance is laughable. But McCain’s lie unconsciously reveals an important truth, which is that when the economy goes into a tailspin, the public prefers a solution long identified with liberalism. McCain could tell the truth, which is that he is all for the free market and can barely wait until the crisis passes so the rich can go about the business of becoming ever richer. But if he does that, he will lose. McCain wants to win. Therefore he lies.

It is not just the economy that features this structural dynamic. If you were just tuning into the election now — no doubt there are many Americans who have not quite tuned in yet — you would think that the Republican Party loves workers, hopes to redistribute income to the lower middle class, embraces immigrants, favors environmental protection, and hates war. Some of the Republican lies, to be sure have nothing to do with policy, such as false estimates of the size of the crowds attending Republican rallies or Sarah Palin’s announcement that she had sold the Alaska governor’s plane on eBay, but of those that do, the overwhelming majority are designed to make the Republican ticket more humane and moderate than it actually is. Only on foreign policy, where McCain shows no interest in hiding his hawkish instincts, can the ticket claim to be taking an honest position even if the face of public skepticism.

Conservatism is an honorable political philosophy whose most eloquent spokesmen, such as John Adams and Edmund Burke, proclaimed the truth as they saw it. This is a tradition that continues among all those contemporary conservatives who have been appalled at the direction the McCain camp has taken and have been willing to say so publicly. In contrast, the conservative populism that has swallowed up the contemporary Republican Party lies because conservative populism is itself a lie. It claims to be guided by faith when it is run by corruption. It speaks of diversity but remains overwhelmingly white. It uses women to push an agenda that would expose women to harm. It speaks of reform tomorrow to slash the reforms of today. It seeks popular support to enact policies that, if revealed for what they were, would be wildly unpopular.

Like so many of John McCain’s critics, I find myself astonished at the sheer brazenness of the lies he tells. But this is not because McCain is more dishonorable than Bush. It is because the conditions under which a truthful Republican could be elected in 2008 are much more difficult than they were in 2000. Through sheer incompetence and cronyism, George W. Bush showed Americans just how dangerous conservatism can be. Because he did, those conservatives who would succeed him face even more difficult obstacles placed in their path to power. In the past, they might have gotten away with lying occasionally. This will no longer do. Expect, therefore, as the country turns to the debates ahead, that John McCain, when addressing issues of foreign policy around which he has been remarkably honest, will begin to lie in that area as well.

And that, really, is Falwell’s legacy. To the religious life of the United States he made no significant contribution. But to the political life of the country, he made one: He founded the Moral Majority. In so doing, Falwell managed to take something holy — one does not have to be a Christian to admire the life and teachings of Jesus Christ — and turned it into something partisan and divisive. Falwell, the quintessential conservative Christian, was always more conservative than Christian. To the extent that history will remember him, it will be as a politician, not as a preacher.

Even Falwell’s political contribution, despite the success of the Republicans during the Reagan years, left a mixed legacy behind. But the Moral Majority disbanded in 1989, prompting the inevitable thought that Falwell’s ideas were neither moral nor in the majority. The movement of conservative Protestants into the base of the Republican Party was far too important a task to be entrusted to a man as oblivious to public relations as Falwell. Once the Ralph Reeds and Karl Roves took over the task of blending religion and politics, there was no room for Falwell. Longing for Washington, he had to settle for Lynchburg, Va.

But then there was cable television, the perfect medium for someone as shallow as this man. Falwell appeared so many times on cable news that one tended to forget how little influence he actually wielded. Had it not been for cable television, Falwell would have been forgotten long ago (and I would not be writing about his legacy). He was perfect for the world created by Fox: extremist, polarizing, Manichaean. (The Manichees, a Persian sect that for a time attracted the great Saint Augustine, adhered to a black-and-white reality in which evil was always in an endless struggle with the good.) Five minutes of hate followed by a commercial break: It is not a format fit for all, but for Falwell, it fit like a glove.

Conservative Christianity has been trying to recover from Falwell for the past two decades. Just as his political views were too buffoonish to make the Moral Majority a reality, his religious sensibilities were too shallow to spread evangelical Protestantism. Evangelicalism grew in the exurban megachurches, and the megachurches, implicitly and occasionally explicitly, rejected Falwell’s approach to the faith. Rick Warren, Joel Osteen, Bill Hybels — these inclusive preachers inherited the mantle of Billy Graham, not Falwell and his great rival Pat Robertson. With the maturation of American evangelicalism has come an interest in social justice, environmentalism and peace. The people who represent evangelical Protestantism’s future want little or nothing to do with injustice, pollution and war.

Of course America’s megachurches offer a thin theology equivalent to 12-step therapy. But Falwell’s contribution to American religion was even less than that. Falwell’s university — Liberty University — never achieved anything resembling serious academic status, although it did produce a decent enough basketball team. Falwell’s church, Thomas Road Baptist Church, with its Scopes-trial era insistence on hell and damnation, was not what American Christians wanted to hear. Falwell’s 1980 book, “Listen, America,” is an embarrassing string of clichés. “Sin is a transgression of God’s law and God’s law is unalterable,” Falwell wrote. “To sin is to voluntarily disobey God and His divine laws.” But it was not the sinfulness of human beings that preoccupied Falwell; it was the sinfulness of the country in which they lived: “Sin brings reproach upon a people. This is the reason we are in a nosedive as a nation.” Less than 50 years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, Falwell could write of America that “we have become one of the most blatantly sinful nations of all time.” Falwell’s theology, such as it was, never made clear how America could be both the promised land and Gomorrah at the same time.

Instead of pondering Jerry Falwell’s legacy, we would be better off asking how this man ever became a public figure in the first place. America has had more than its share of religiously inspired demagogues — Dr. Fred Swartz, Billy James Hargis, Carl McIntyre come to mind — but they are forgotten figures, marginal even to the times in which lived. One would like to believe that the United States has become a bigger and better country since the days when men like them preached about captive nations and denounced the pernicious influence of rock ‘n’ roll. But then there is Jerry Falwell. In death, as he did in life, he reminds us that demagoguery never dies; it just changes its form. Jerry Falwell expressed great hate for a lot of his fellow Americans. It is no wonder that so many of them will greet his death with something less than love.

Responses to Katrina, like responses to Hobbes, can be divided into two broad camps. There are those who say that a state of nature reveals humanity as it really is; we are little more than animals, depraved creatures burdened by sin and self-interest and desperately in need of the firm guidance that only a deity or armed force can provide. For others, by contrast, the state of nature is a reminder of where we would be if we had not invented civilization; we are not animals driven by nature but builders of societies capable of keeping nature at bay. Reminded by anarchy of what a precious achievement civilization is, we transform examples of humans acting at their worst to do everything in power to help them act their best.

Remarkably for a society as modern as the United States, a surprising number of commentators find themselves attracted to the raw brutalities of nature revealed by Katrina. For them, the fact that so many of the victims are black is not just an accident; Africa, and by implications African-Americans, have traditionally been viewed by whites, especially by whites in the South, as one step removed from nature. The ever self-righteous pundits on Fox News find that images of black young men walking off with plasma-screen televisions are just too convenient to ignore. Humans as depraved as these barely deserve our help. “It makes no sense to spend billions of dollars to rebuild a city that’s 7 feet under sea level,” as House Speaker Dennis Hastert put it. “It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed.”

In the state of nature, no one is responsible for you. The situation in New Orleans may look like chaos, our right-wing brethren say, but in reality it is not that different from a market economy in which everyone is responsible for the choices he or she makes. People may be suffering, but, as Federal Emergency Management Agency director Michael Brown put it, residents “chose not to leave the city.” Left unsaid, but implicit in the idea of choice, is that we ought to be wary of extending too much help to people so unable to act in their own best interest that financial assistance is likely to be wasted on them. Of course, it is easier to choose to leave if you can afford a car, but no one ever said that fairness reigns in the state of nature.

Fairness may not run rampant in the state of nature, but vigilantism does. For every commentator lecturing the poor for looting, others find understandable, and maybe even a touch admirable, those who pick up guns to defend their provisions against — well, you don’t really have to spell out whom they fear. Order is preferable to chaos, but if order can only be maintained by a government that might have to raise taxes and call its National Guard home where it belongs, then perhaps chaos is preferable to order.

There is a perverse logic working here: If Americans learn how hard it is to pacify New Orleans, perhaps they will understand why our military cannot control Baghdad.

By contrast, the residents of New Orleans themselves, and the sympathetic members of the media covering their plight, sum up their political philosophy in one word: “help.” That is, in fact, one of the most important words in the history of Western thought. Why shouldn’t desperate human beings be deserving of the help the more fortunate can provide them? Once human beings start helping each other, society comes into existence. And once we have society at our disposal, we need no longer sit back and allow disaster to unfurl, irrespective of whether that disaster is caused by nature or our own ignorance.

For those who think this way, the tragedy of Katrina is a human one as well as a natural one. We knew it was coming. Our government anticipated it and even, when it had more funds available to it, developed plans for meeting it. Far from being responsible for their own plight, the victims are innocent; blame instead belongs to those who cut the funding for disaster relief, sent the troops out to wreak havoc abroad rather than keep order at home, and were so slow to respond because they lacked the empathy to put themselves in the place of those so unlike themselves.

Socially created, Katrina’s chaos can be socially cured. Horrifying as its stories are, they will serve a positive purpose if we use them to talk about race, poverty and disaster planning. The 1755 Lisbon earthquake launched the Enlightenment; since a good God could not have killed so many innocent people, philosophers began to argue that humans were themselves responsible for the good and evil around them. Hurricane Katrina’s devastation could have the same consequence: If government could have prevented it, and if government is required for dealing with it, then could we not at the least stop bashing government? Government, for modern people like us, is civilization; it is what keeps us from descending into the state of nature that, like Lake Pontchartrain, threatens the earthly city in which we live.

Some worry that the events unleashed in the aftermath of Katrina will inflame the American culture war. If only we could be so lucky. Our culture war is puny when compared with Hobbes’ war of all against all. As we watch the tragedy of Katrina unfold, we are not talking about relatively insignificant matters such as who should marry whom. We are talking about civilization itself, why its invention has been humanity’s greatest accomplishment and why we should do everything in our power to protect it. That we have so many people in our midst, including in the seats of power in Washington, who cannot understand what an improvement society is over nature is a tragedy fully as destructive as Katrina’s. And when the totality of that tragedy is reckoned, it may cause more death and destruction than nature is capable of doing.

Yet however we think and act in a media-saturated age, nearly every serious philosopher, none more so than the great Immanuel Kant, believed that we would be wrong to act out of emotional identification with a particular person. Especially when an issue is as heart-wrenching as the Schiavo family drama, it is important than we never lose our capacity to act reflectively rather than impulsively. And reflection demands that we consider each case on the basis of rules meant to apply to all cases.

Americans embody Kantian reasoning in the often-cited dictum that we are a government of laws, not of men. The Schiavo case reminds us why that dictum matters. In a case as conflict-ridden and morally wrenching as this one, the courts have reached a decision: Michael Schiavo’s claim that Terri would not have wanted to live this way has been upheld. In relying on its own form of civil disobedience, the U.S. Congress is claiming that we are a government of men, not of laws. Even a moment of reflection suggests why this is a bad idea; governments of men give to whomever is in power the capacity to overrule rights and procedures to get what they want. Another term for that is “dictatorship.” Upholding law might just be more important than preventing a death.

Emotion is a poor basis for making moral decisions for a second reason; it is cheap, while reason is dear. Nothing is easier to offer than sympathy at a distance. Those rushing to Terri’s “side” have no conscience with which to struggle, no doubts to be resolved, no principles to violate. They need not even be consistent, which is why they can urge respect for Terri’s life while ignoring all the deaths their cuts in Medicaid will cause. Emotional appeals surround us. No politician will earn a profile in courage by wallowing in them.

Reason, by contrast, ennobles and inspires, demanding, as it does, that we consider the interests of humanity as well as humans. Far from being easy, reason requires courage. Contrast the posturing of Republican legislators with the dignity of Florida Judge George Greer. In the past two weeks one judge has been shot in Atlanta and the family of another killed in Chicago. Judge Greer knows full well that in the Schiavo case, passions run high and people with links to violence, such as antiabortion activist Randall Terry, are involved. Greer could have taken the easy way out and protected himself and his family. He chose to uphold the majesty of the law. He should be a hero. Zealots could consider him a murderer.

Emotion, finally, fails as policy because hypocrisy is its first cousin. Intent on protecting Terri Schiavo’s right to live, Republicans cannot be oblivious to the benefits yielded by her death. To this point, “liberals” and “activist judges” can only be blamed for trying to resolve the case. Imagine the conservative glee if it is resolved and the feeding tube is removed. Every court ruling will become grounds for appointing only the most conservative of judges. Every Democrat who speaks in the language of rights and reason will be treated as an accomplice to death. The quest for emotional satisfaction can never be fulfilled; Bill O’Reilly will always demand more. We cannot predict Terri Schiavo’s fate, but we can surely anticipate outrage inflation, as every attempt to find moral guidelines in the murky world of death and dying becomes a political football.

This is why a sane society would try to put cases such as Terri Schiavo’s outside the realm of politics. Let us by all means have a national debate over persistent vegetative states, living wills and conflicts between husbands and parents. But let us hold that debate over general principles. Our laws must be designed for unnamed individuals in the future, not on behalf of specific people in the here-and-now.

Choosing the universal over the particular, our framers banned “bills of attainder,” laws that punish single individuals. The bill passed this weekend may not be a bill of attainder because it did not involve imposing a punishment. But we would nonetheless be wise to recall James Madison’s warning, in Federalist No. 44, that “bills of attainder, ex post facto laws, and laws impairing the obligations of contracts, are contrary to the first principles of the social compact, and to every principle of sound legislation … The sober people of America are weary of the fluctuating policy which has directed the public councils. They have seen with regret and indignation that sudden changes and legislative interferences, in cases affecting personal rights, become jobs in the hands of enterprising and influential speculators, and snares to the more-industrious and less-informed part of the community.”

Tom DeLay is a speculator in the lives of others. A political system that responds to him has come a long way from the ideals of the men who founded it.

The Kennedy-inspired appreciation for courage lives on; later this month, Hyperion books will publish “Profiles in Courage for Our Time,” a collection of essays edited by Caroline Kennedy. Although the original book included only senators, this time one president is included: Gerald R. Ford, for his unpopular pardon of Richard Nixon. Otherwise, whether the praise goes to former New Jersey Gov. James Florio for his support of gun control, or Sens. John McCain and Russ Feingold for their diligence on behalf of campaign finance, the lesson Caroline Kennedy’s father taught is reinforced: Great leaders are those who buck the tides.

It is not too early in the Bush presidency to speculate about how he will be judged by the standards we have traditionally used to evaluate our political leadership. Both popular mythology and academic analysis have had a lot to say about who our great leaders have been — and why they have been great. And by the “Profiles” standard, one ought to immediately begin to include George W. Bush among the elect. Politics is a notoriously unpredictable business, but if Bush serves two full terms, the future is likely to include not only a significant shift to the right with consequences that will be felt for years, but a return to the days, seemingly gone forever during the Vietnam years, when an “imperial presidency” dominates the political landscape, rendering all other institutions of government to secondary roles.

And Bush, like a character out of Thoreau, has done all this by walking to the beat of his own drummer. Consider his proposed tax cuts. There has never existed strong public backing for the cuts President Bush has made the centerpiece of his domestic policy. Expert opinion is close to unanimous that current conditions require steps to bring deficits under control rather than to expand them for the foreseeable future. Yet nothing seems capable of deterring him from pursuit of a policy he is convinced is the right thing to do. Whether you admire or detest him — everyone in America seems to be in one camp or another — you have to conclude that vacillation is not in his political genes. Like every other president, Bush follows the polls, but while support for tax cuts can go up and down, his position never changes. Even his harshest critics ought to find something admirable in a man so intent on sticking to his convictions.

Bush’s consistency on domestic policy pales in comparison to the determination he demonstrated over Iraq. Unlike Bill Clinton, who never could seem to make up his mind whether U.S. power should be used to stop genocide in Rwanda or Bosnia, Bush had no hesitation in confronting Saddam Hussein. Polls showed that Americans clearly wanted the president to win the support of the U.N., as well as that of our allies, before going to war in Iraq; he went ahead without the former and with only a few of the latter and, lo and behold, public opinion followed him. World opinion — or so we once believed — matters in foreign policy, yet the president was perfectly willing to make enemies in Europe to defeat his enemy in Baghdad. And, at least until now, he has been rewarded for showing the courage of his convictions. By standing firm, he has made everyone else look weak. Gamblers tend to win big — when they win. Bush took genuine risks and has not been shy about claiming the pot.

And yet Kennedy’s choice of Thomas Hart Benton suggests what, besides courage, goes into the definition of great leadership: Benton was not only firm, he also happened to have been right. There were other politicians whose convictions in favor of slavery were as strong as Benton’s feelings toward the Union, yet we do not include Sen. Henry Foote of Mississippi — who at one point in a heated debate with Benton on the Senate floor pulled a pistol and threatened to use it — among our great leaders. Kennedy’s book deliberately included politicians to celebrate whose decisions turned out to be good for their country. (This does not mean that all of them were liberals; “Profiles in Courage” includes a portrait of Mr. Republican, Sen. Robert A. Taft of Ohio, who was celebrated for his fidelity to strict constitutionalism, even as his position led him to be quite critical of the Nuremberg trials.) Published one year after the U. S. Senate censured Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, “Profiles in Courage” wanted to leave the impression that the best leaders were builders of a strong society, not those whose shortsightedness threatened to tear it down. Can anyone, at this moment, make that claim about the Bush administration?

When they discuss great leadership, academics often pick up where “Profiles in Courage” left off. For fields riven by political and methodological dispute, political science and history hold a strikingly consensual view of presidential greatness: Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt are nearly always in, while John Adams, Ulysses S. Grant and a host of others more likely to appear in trivia contests than textbooks make up the worst. (Not even David McCullough’s hero-worshipping biography of Adams persuaded this reader of his presidential greatness.)

Not only is there surprising agreement among academics on who was great, there is something of a consensus on what made them great. Washington’s decision to step down created a two-term tradition that has helped the country avoid monarchical temptations. Jefferson’s purchase of Louisiana paved the way for the nation to become a continent. Jackson was responsible for modern democracy as we understand it. Lincoln put defense of the Union ahead of everything else, even civil liberty. Roosevelt’s New Deal as well as his World War II leadership saved the country from depression and fascism. We live in revisionist times when yesterday’s truths are continuously reexamined; Andrew Jackson, for example, is unfashionable these days for his cruelty toward Native Americans, indeed his cruelty toward everyone. Yet no one has tried to make the case that Lincoln should have been more willing to compromise with Jefferson Davis, or Roosevelt more believing of the professed intentions of Adolf Hitler. Their judgment has stood the test of time.

Making the right decisions, however, is not enough. As political scientists Marc Landy and Sidney M. Milkis argue in their fascinating book “Presidential Greatness,” our great leaders have been tutors; as Felix Frankfurter said of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, they take “the country to school.” One way they do so is through their eloquence. Kennedy himself did not live long enough to influence American policy, but his words were sufficient to include him among the presidents who will always be remembered. Ronald Reagan shared little with Kennedy, but he too spoke words that are unlikely ever to be forgotten.

Eloquence may well be the most misunderstood characteristic of leadership. It is not, as many believe, a talent that can be mastered by good coaching, nor is it something that comes naturally to some people while resisting the best efforts of others. Eloquent presidents, rather, are those who perceive a need the public does not even know it has and find the right words to address it. Eloquence is the opposite of both manipulation and demagoguery. The manipulative leader perceives correctly what people really need and then tries to persuade them that they need something else. And the demagogue takes the needs people are persuaded they have and reinforces them, even when people’s perceptions of their own needs are incorrect; demagoguery flatters, while eloquence elevates. Presidents who manifest eloquence intuitively understand what people would choose when they are guided by what our most eloquent (and without doubt our greatest) president, Abraham Lincoln, called the “better angels of our nature.”

Leaders educate not only by the words they speak; they also understand how much time it takes for their lessons to sink in. Franklin Roosevelt knew that Hitler would have to be defeated militarily with America’s help. He also knew how powerful isolationist sentiment could be in the United States. Like any great teacher, Roosevelt handed out his lessons in doses, watching to see how prepared Americans were to accept the new responsibilities being placed upon them before placing even more.

Characteristic of his approach was the way he handled the Lend Lease Act of 1941, a program of military support to Great Britain. The administration went to great lengths to show that Britain was unable to pay for its own defense (to the consternation of Churchill) and that we would help them by lending rather than granting them money, all the while realizing, without ever saying so, that once we were in this far, it was only a matter of time before the American public accepted the need to enter the war on the British side. Roosevelt realized that one of his predecessors who came close to greatness, Woodrow Wilson, eventually failed the test because he lacked the patience to explain why his policies, even when they were right, should be accepted by ordinary people.

So if courage is the defining quality of leadership as Kennedy understood it, wisdom is the quality most often emphasized by political scientists and historians. When Lyndon Johnson, not one of our greatest presidents, found himself in that quandary called Vietnam, he turned for advice to a group of foreign policy advisors dubbed “the wise men.” That might not have proven an apt description. But his instincts, at least, were right; at crucial turning points in our nation’s history, presidents ought to try to do what is neither popular nor principled but what is wise.

Is George W. Bush, for all his steadfastness, either wise himself or capable of relying upon others who are? There is considerable reason to doubt it. Of course he made the right call on Iraq. Or did he? It does not take wisdom to win military battles; ammunition usually does that. But it does take wisdom to achieve Bush’s larger goal of creating post-Cold War global stability. Is it wise for America to be taking on the drawing of a new global map without the support of the United Nations and against the wishes of most people in the world? Would a wise president, moreover, begin such a huge undertaking without any effort to prepare the American people for the costs his ambitions will impose? Does generous magnanimity better serve the president’s goals at this time than churlish resentment? The very determination that led Bush to neglect his critics and to accomplish so quickly his military victory in Iraq is the enemy of the wisdom he will need to repair the political damage that will follow if no weapons of mass destruction are found there or if religious fundamentalism replaces democratic dreams once American forces leave.

With respect to the military victory in Iraq, the president got something right. But when it comes to his domestic agenda, his programs are as unwise as any can be. Missing from the way in which Bush argues on behalf of his tax cut is any sense that the prospects of future generations will be severely crippled by the fantastic sums the government will have to expend in interest payments to cover the deficits his policy seems designed to produce. No tale of fiscal woe from governors, even those of his own party, moves him. No knowledge of what has happened in history when governments have acted with fiscal irresponsibility matters to him. It is as if the actual country, its families and their lives, are secondary to his inward determination never to back down on a promise that only the extreme right wing ever recalls him making. His policies are those of a man more concerned with the strength of his political base than the strength of his country.

Under this administration, in other words, the president does not tutor the public; on the contrary, from economists to newspaper editorialists to even a couple of Republican senators, the entire country has united behind an effort to instruct the president. This is not the first time in American history that one element of the political system has patiently tried to educate the other about the rules of public finance; Alexander Hamilton relied on “The Federalist Papers” to do just that. But it surely is the first time that the tutorial originates with the taxpayers rather than the tax collectors.

President Bush’s neglect of the tutorial function of the presidency helps explain his much-noted lack of eloquence. Mispronunciations and Texas speech patterns have nothing to do with Bush’s failings in the realm of words. The president cannot speak to a deeper need unrecognized by his fellow Americans because the only need recognized by his political philosophy is self-interest narrowly understood. Fully cognizant of how ignoble his objectives would appear if stated in truthful terms, he therefore has little choice but to obfuscate, and obfuscation can never be transformed into eloquence. If the president’s speeches so often fail to move, it is because he has not offered anything worth moving for; you simply do not rise to the heights of greatness by calling for the elimination of taxes on dividends. The wealthy he wishes to reward are too interested in lining their pockets to care whether angels, better or otherwise, are watching what they do.

This president’s lack of responsibility is revealed not only by the policies he pursues, but by the way he pursues them. FDR was famous for soliciting conflicting opinions from those surrounding him so that he could choose from among them. It was not that he possessed the training in economics they lacked; on the contrary, they were the experts and he was the politician. But he did possess the wisdom that experts often lack. And he relied upon that wisdom for his famous flexibility; Roosevelt was quite capable of shifting his positions as new advice came in without ever paying a price at the polls.

Although Bush receives conflicting advice on foreign policy — the disagreements between the departments of State and Defense in this administration are as public as any disagreements among FDR’s advisors — no such squabbles are permitted on domestic policy. By surrounding himself only with people who share the same point of view, Bush all but acknowledges that in this area he has no instincts — and thus, no wisdom — of his own to offer. If the country ever needed evidence that deep tax cuts are fiscally untenable, the unbending convictions offered to justify them are evidence enough. Economies are governed by real-world actions, not principles drawn from textbooks. Any administration that meets all criticism with citations from the latter and a blind eye toward the former lacks not only wisdom, but the intelligence needed to know where to find it.

The experience of Bush suggests that we need to be careful in selecting the virtues that make for great presidential leadership. Setting a course requires courage and determination, the virtues so admired by Kennedy, and Bush surely has the one and has shown the other. But ensuring that the course is a good one demands virtues of another sort. There is the virtue of discernment, the ability to weigh competing policies and select the ones that best correspond with America’s values and long-term goals. There is the virtue of humility, manifested in a willingness to admit mistakes and redraw plans. And there is the virtue of confidence, the ability to treat those who disagree with you with respect.

Without those qualities, firmness becomes intransigence, initiative morphs into arrogance, and conviction is transformed into dogma. Bush’s ability to stay on message, so vital to getting him where he is, is the major obstacle in his path of going any further. Should he persist in the methods of governance he has chosen — and there is no reason to believe that he will not — Millard Fillmore beckons, not Abraham Lincoln.