With appeals for homeland security and the necessity to find Saddam's weapons, he rallied a large majority of the American people in support the war in Iraq. It was a matter of national interest. When that war was quickly won and the troops found no weapons of mass destruction, the president was forced to look to other themes muted in his original assessment. Like Lincoln, he had to expand his vision in changed circumstances.
The president now appeals to pragmatism fused with idealism. "In democratic and successful societies, men and women do not swear allegiance to malcontents and murderers; they turn their hearts and labor to building better lives," he said in London. "Democratic governments do not shelter terrorist camps or attack their peaceful neighbors; they honor the aspiration and dignity of their own people."
The president's new rhetoric places him squarely in the tradition of Woodrow Wilson, the Presbyterian preacher's son who was president of Princeton before he was president of the United States. This would have been an implausible comparison only three years earlier. Like Wilson, he wants "to make the world safe for democracy."
The president seems to like the comparison. He frequently invokes Wilson as a warning to nations that won't stand up to barbarism. Against Wilson's idealism, the president says, "free nations failed to recognize, much less confront, the aggressive evil in plain sight." Within a generation after Wilson's failure to persuade others to stand with him against evil, the civilized nations were forced to confront Munich, Auschwitz and the Blitz.
Bush-bashers see only cynicism in the president's language, accusing him of becoming a man in search of a rationale for an unnecessary war. Similar things were said of Abraham Lincoln when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
But if Lincoln was slow to come to the idea of freeing the slaves, he recognized its importance (as well as its utility) when he lifted his pen to sign it.
"If my name ever goes into history," he told William Seward, his secretary of state, "it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it." History similarly waits for George W. Bush.