What you have not addressed sufficiently, in my judgment, is what I call the "all hat and no cattle" nature of the Republicans. The Republicans have talked a pretty good game around election times, but they have acted at all times essentially in the same way the Democrats would, in my estimation, have acted.

Are the Republicans promising to fight for small government, then voting for spending increases and the expansion of the welfare state? And more important, are they promising to fight the war, then passively surrendering to our enemies?

On the first question, there is no doubt that (with a few exceptions, including several important tax cuts) the Republicans have betrayed their "small government," pro-free-market rhetoric—though there is also evidence that the party is wracked with internal dissent on this issue, along with loud complaints from the rank and file that its leaders have "abandoned their principles." (See item #1 above.) But since spending is not the main issue of this election, let us focus on the complaint that Bush has talked tough in the War on Terrorism but failed to act.

To judge this objectively, it is important not to project our best hopes onto Bush. He has never explicitly promised a sweeping military campaign against all Islamist regimes, and while on the campaign trail, he has never committed to take specific actions. He will go to the American people saying, "we need to keep fighting," or, at his best, "we need to prevent the world's most dangerous regimes from obtaining the world's most destructive weapons." But he did not campaign in 2002 by saying "vote for the Republicans, and I will invade Iraq." He did not campaign in 2004 by saying "vote for me, and I will subdue Fallujah." And he won't come to us in this election and say, "vote for the Republicans, and I will bomb Iran."

Bush's public statements on his war strategy, especially during election campaigns, have generally been more about our overall attitude toward the war than about specific tactics. Do we want to persist and keep fighting, or do we want to wring our hands in despair and give up? He gives us a choice between two basic approaches to the issue, but he does not campaign on specifics. There is some argument for this—that a president's words are so important that he should not publicly commit himself to a specific action until he is actually prepared to take it. But it can also be immensely frustrating, since the voter feels that he is being asked to endorse vague aspirations for action instead of an explicit plan of action.

Moreover, I mentioned Tuesday one of the factors that makes it seem as if Bush is always making empty promises. He has taken his most vigorous actions right after an election, then he stops taking the initiative in the war for a period of at least six months before the next election. This approach conspires to put the maximum time between his last really meaningful new action and his current, vague promises.

Michael Ledeen captures my own sense of this factor when he writes that Bush seems to know that Iran is at war with the United States, but he is deliberately delaying any American response.

But it doesn't take that much effort to cast our minds back and remember that Bush has taken some bold actions in the War on Terrorism—and that these actions did live up to his words.

In his 2002 State of the Union address, Bush stated one of the central principles of the Bush Doctrine: "Some governments will be timid in the face of terror. And make no mistake about it: if they do not act, America will…. I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer. The United States will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons."

This was a statement that the United States would be willing to use force unilaterally and pre-emptively to prevent terror-sponsoring regimes from acquiring nuclear weapons—an entirely valid war policy. And he did act on it, by invading Iraq. Admittedly, he did not apply this policy without first dragging us through a year of diplomatic sidetracks, in a futile attempt to gain multilateral approval at the UN. But he did eventually apply it.

Unilateral pre-emption was Bush's "hat," and the invasion of Iraq was his "cattle."

This was a big step. Ideologically, the doctrine of unilateral pre-emption was the Bush administration's primary new contribution to the American debate over the morality of war. Militarily, the invasion of Iraq was a massive and risky undertaking, whose exact risks no one fully anticipated at the time. And politically, as we have discovered, it ignited fierce opposition.

In fact, the current political and military situation in the War on Terrorism is a product, not of a total lack of action by the Bush administration, but of this one big action and the reaction to it.

It turns out that in invading Iraq, Bush overreached the domestic political support available to him. The American left's immediate reaction to the invasion of Iraq was visceral opposition. Most Democrats will tell you that they oppose the war because they later discovered that they were "misled" about Saddam's possession of chemical weapons, or that they oppose the war because it was "mismanaged." All of this is misdirection. The left opposed the Iraq War from the very beginning, when it was at the height of its success.

Two moments stand out in my memory from April 9, 2003, the day that an American tank recovery vehicle pulled down Saddam Hussein's statue in the center of Baghdad. That day, I was returning from an out-of-town business trip, and I arrived at the small airport in our local university town just in time to see the live coverage of Saddam Hussein's statue coming down. I thought this was a pretty exciting moment, but what struck me is that, among the small crowd of people in the terminal waiting for their planes, I seemed to be the only one with that opinion. There was an odd indifference among the other observers. The second moment was a Democratic Party event at which an exuberant Joseph Lieberman proclaimed April 9 "V-I Day" for "Victory in Iraq"—only to be met with a rather pointed silence from the crowd.

These were ominous early warning signs. When it turned out—against everyone's expectations—that Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction were a bluff, the leftists who were silent and sullen on April 9 found their excuse to openly and vigorously oppose the war.

This, in turn, gave the Iraqi insurgents and their sponsors in Iran and Syria a green light for their military strategy, whose central calculation is the presence of significant internal opposition to the war within the United States, opposition that they believe will allow them to win in the halls of Congress what they cannot win on the battlefield.

Of course, President Bush has missed many opportunities to make the situation better, including his failure to prepare for the task of occupying Iraq, his failure to immediately and decisively suppress the country's Shiite militias, and his failure to grasp that he was fighting a regional war that he cannot win without toppling the regimes of Syria and Iran. But he has also engaged in significant new actions since then, primarily the military campaign against the Sunni insurgency that began just days after the 2004 election.

All of Bush's errors could have been, and still can be, corrected. The central fact that explains why we haven't corrected them is not Bush's inaction, but the Democrats' concerted attempt to remove any political sanction for the war. That is why the primary energy in the national debate is not going to the urgent question of how we should change our policy to more quickly and surely achieve victory, but to the question of whether or not we should even keep trying to win.

This leads to a wider observation about the nature of American politics. The fact is that virtually all national policies are muddled and mixed, and every political leader seems to be "all hat and no cattle" in the eyes of every faction of his supporters—and this is a phenomenon deliberately built in to the structure of the American political system.

Washington Post economics commentator Robert Samuelson sketched the outlines of this phenomenon in a recent column.

The Catch-22 of American democracy is this: a government that mirrors public opinion offends public opinion by failing to do what it promises. People then conclude that the system has "failed."…

Americans favor balanced budgets. But in 66 years of surveys, taxpayers have never said their income taxes were too low, reports Karlyn Bowman of the American Enterprise Institute. A Gallup poll in April found that 48 percent thought their taxes too high and only 2 percent too low. Americans also think government spending is hugely wasteful; 61 percent said so in a 2004 poll by the University of Michigan. But locating that waste is hard. A recent Fox News poll found that only 19 percent favor cuts in Social Security, 21 percent in health care, 19 percent in education, and 25 percent for the military….

Facing such inconsistencies, how can government make sensible policy? Not easily….

We won't acknowledge choices, contradictions, unpalatable facts. So, many problems persist for years. Throwing the bums out is a venerable tradition, but what if the ultimate bums are us?

Samuelson has always been particularly strong in applying this observation to national economic policy. We have chronic budget deficits, he keeps pointing out, because the American people want lower taxes, while also opposing any significant cut in federal spending. The deficit is just a measure of the American public's own contradiction.

I was particularly amused by the figures he gives about how many people would support cuts in any one particular area of the budget. If you add up all of the numbers, an overwhelming majority of people would probably support spending cuts in general. But only 20% support spending cuts in any one particular area. In certain European political systems, where representation in parliament is awarded based on a party's proportion of the popular vote, a political party with the support of 20% of the people can still play a crucial role in politics. In the American system, where the "winner takes all," the support of 20% of the voters gets you nowhere.

This is why every political faction—good or bad—tends to be disappointed in its leaders. The Evangelicals are disappointed in the Republicans for failing to do more to promote their agenda, while the secular left is uneasy with the Democrats' swerve toward religious rhetoric and signs that they are going soft on their stay in office, while the "small-government conservatives" are livid at the Republicans for "going native" in Washington. The reason is that each of these factions is large enough to have a strong influence on a given politician or party—but not large enough to keep it in power based only on their own votes.

Samuelson notes that there are exceptions, when "some crisis or event fosters national unity," and he notes that "Bush had such a moment after September 11." But those moments are generally temporary. I remember a striking passage from Bob Woodward's first book on the Bush White House, Bush at War, in which he recounts the president's sober reaction to the immediate outpouring of international support for the United States after September 11. "In a few years," he cautioned his aides, "only the Brits may still be with us."

I wonder if he looked at his 85% approval rating in public opinion polls and made the same projection, calculating how many of the American people would still support the war a few years later. This may help explain why his action immediately after September 11 seemed so much more cautious than what the public, at that moment, would have approved.

Of course, Bush could have done a lot more to change public opinion, and a swifter and more vigorous execution of the war would have preserved more of that public support and accomplished much more while he still had it. But the fact remains that a very significant percentage of the population does not support the war—and it has exploited every setback in that conflict, not to offer alternative leadership or better recommendations, but simply to undermine the war effort as such.

On foreign policy, fortunately, the president has more independence from the short-term variations of American political opinion. He does not need immediate congressional approval for every action he takes. But there are limits to how much he can attempt without broad public support—limits that could become very clear in the next year, if Democrats win control of Congress.

The basic fact conditioning our war policy is that America itself is divided on whether it is moral or practical to go to war to topple dictatorships in the Middle East. And the part that answers this question with an unqualified, unconflicted "no" holds a very influential place in our culture. They write articles exposing counter-terrorist surveillance programs. They give more television airtime to Abu Ghraib than they do to recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor. They produce anti-war documentaries, and they fail to produce films showing the evil of our enemies or celebrating American heroism in the war.

The result is the same thing you can see in domestic politics, but with more tragic results. Those who support the war and want to see it fought more assertively are likely to be disappointed with any election result for the foreseeable future. The simple reason is that America is an ideological and political battleground in which neither side has the political power to promote its agenda unopposed.

We should not be surprised when the actions of our political leaders reflect the division in America's culture.

This is a source of tragic disappointment in war. In my view, it will not prevent us from winning the war (especially if Democrats do not win control of Congress), but it will and already has contributed to the war dragging out longer than was necessary, with more failures and reversals.

But this phenomenon also has some beneficial results. The weakness of the American system is that it is nearly impossible to adopt and execute good policies unless they are uncontroversially accepted by the overwhelming majority of the American people. The strength of the American system is that the same thing applies (and even more so) to bad policies.

This is what may prevent the Democrats from causing an immediate collapse and defeat in our war strategy, even if they do win a narrow majority in Congress. While the Republicans no longer have a strong majority in favor of the war, the Democrats certainly do not have a strong majority against it.

This is also why I regard the threat of an American "theocracy" as an exaggeration, and the idea that such a theocracy would be pushed forward by this election as a triple exaggeration. According to the estimates I have seen, Evangelical Christians constitute at most 23% of the population, and although they favor the Republicans, they are still split between the two parties. The hard-core religious right (of which the Evangelicals are the leading edge), constitutes well under 20% of the voting public—fewer people than support cuts in Social Security spending. The only way they can exert any really powerful influence on American politics is by rapidly increasing their numbers by a very large percentage—a result that is extremely unlikely under any circumstances, and which certainly cannot be achieved by mere political means.

And that points to a deeper virtue of the structure of the American system. In our political system, no group can rely on the brute power of its numbers, nor can it rely only on the stridency and passionate emotion with which it proclaims its beliefs (as the "angry left" is currently discovering, which just makes it angrier). It can only achieve political power by a long, patient campaign of persuasion. It can only achieve political power by reaching beyond its "base" to speak to those who do not yet agree with its agenda.

That is the deepest disadvantage faced, in the American system, by bad ideas. In a contest of political persuasion, blind faith and subjective emotionalism are always at a disadvantage when placed against facts and reasoning.

It reminds me of a favorite line from the 1992 film version of The Last of the Mohicans, when one exasperated British officer explains to another, "One has to reason with these colonials to get them to do anything. It's awfully tiring, but it's the lay of the land."

That is the nature of the American political system. And it is the reason you should not set up unrealistic expectations about the results of your vote in any one election, and not to be too outraged when a politician or a party campaigns on a platform and does not deliver as much as it promises. Every form of political action, from voting to writing op-eds, is part of a process of persuasion.

This process is necessarily long and tortuous. As with individuals, so with a whole culture, only more so: breakthroughs are rarely achieved in a moment of instant conversion, but are achieved incrementally, one piece of evidence at a time, one new idea at a time. All political change is moved forward, not through the sweep of inevitable historical or philosophical forces, but through the actual, concrete means by which philosophy works on the individual's mind: through a continual series of debates precipitated by concrete problems and questions and driven forward by a daily flow of new facts and arguments.