Only by doing whatever it takes to change the subject to the war on terror -- not to what he's actually doing about terrorist threats, but to his "leadership," whatever that means -- can he get a bump in the polls.
In a barely veiled reference to Yasir Arafat, whom Mr. Bush wants to oust as Palestinian leader, the president said that the security force "must be designed to fight off terror, not designed to serve the whims and interests of a -- of one person".
Now is the moment to put an end to the "global war on terror", not to ease our way into its permanent establishment.
To assert that staying in the race could be aiding "the surrender to terror" is not only a breathtakingly arrogant statement, it also belies a remarkably simplistic view of the complex ideological quagmire in which we now find ourselves.
Some of the top countries in the report that produced those linked to terror were not included in Trump's travel ban.
Luckily for us, at least so far the fundamentalists who turn to terror do not get what makes us tick either.
In fact, months ago a senior adviser to Mr. Bush predicted that should a terrorist attack occur in Europe, it would probably drive the Europeans closer to the United States and its approach to the campaign against terror, not away from it.
To that end, Mr. Bush on Friday, in a hint of how he is approaching the issue, went from playing down the numbers to quickly turning back to Topic A. The stream of e-mail messages from his campaign to reporters focused on terror, not the economy.
An earlier version of this article today about President Bush's speech on the war in Iraq misstated the subject of a comment he made to Matt Lauer of NBC in August 2004, "I don't think you can win it". He referred to the war on terror, not the war in Iraq.
This approach came to a preliminary conclusion when the minister of justice more or less voluntarily left his position and was applauded by the opposition for "taking responsibility" – as if he, or the government, were primarily to blame for the terror, not the terrorist himself.
