[W]e must not underrate President Bush's capacity for getting his way. He is a minority president who lost the popular election by more than half a million votes. The first minority president, John Quincy Adams, also a president's son, said apologetically in his inaugural address, "Less possessed of your confidence, in advance, than any of my predecessors, I am deeply conscious of the prospect that I shall stand more and oftener in need of your indulgence." There were no such apologies in Mr. Bush's inaugural address. He acted as if he had won in a landslide and had earned an electoral mandate—and he got away with it.

For all his buffoonish side, the President is secure in himself, disciplined, decisive and crafty, and capable of concentrating on a few priorities. He has maintained control of a rag-tag Republican coalition, well described by Kevin Phillips (author of The Emerging Republican Majority, 1969) as consisting of "Wall Street, Big Energy, multinational corporations, the Military-Industrial Complex, the Religious Right, the Market Extremist think-tanks, and the Rush Limbaugh Axis." All these groups agree in their strong support of their president, though they sharply disagree among themselves.

President Bush radiates a serene but scary certitude when confronted with complicated problems or disagreements. "There is no doubt in my mind we're doing the right thing," he told Bob Woodward. "Not one doubt." Friends attribute this serenity to his religious faith. Woodward, who interviewed Mr. Bush for nearly four hours for his book Bush at War, came away with the clear impression that "the president was casting his mission and that of the country in the grand vision of God's master plan." "I'm here for a reason," Mr. Bush told Karl Rove, his political wizard, "and this is going to be how we're going to be judged." A senior aide commented that the President "really believes he was placed here to do this [his military policy] as part of a divine plan."

Though there is no doubting the sincerity of Mr. Bush's religious beliefs, his faith also serves his political purposes. Religious statistics are notoriously unreliable, but perhaps a third of Americans are born-again, evangelical Christians. In my youth, Protestant fundamentalists could be depended upon to be anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic. They led the campaign against Al Smith in 1928 and John F. Kennedy in 1960. They had lynched Leo Frank in Georgia in 1915. In those days, fundamentalists were a disdained and isolated Bible Belt minority. But in the last generation the Christian right has formed an alliance with right-wing Catholics over abortion and an alliance with right-wing Jews over the Holy Land. In consequence, they are a far more potent political force today, perhaps affecting more than 40 percent of the electorate; they give a born-again president a built-in advantage.

As Eisenhower's scrambled syntax misled people about his executive determination and political skills, so Mr. Bush's scrambled syntax misleads people, especially liberal intellectuals. The late Murray Kempton was among the first liberals to spot Ike's well-concealed political prowess—"devious" in the best sense of the word, as Nixon said. In an article in Time, "The Power of One," Michael Kinsley correctly diagnosed Mr. Bush as "the real thing: a leader." This is certainly not to suggest that Mr. Bush has the weight of experience and the circumspection of judgment that characterized Ike. But he is skillful at mobilizing opinion and brushing aside opposition.

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