• The President told NBC News that John Kerry’s service in Vietnam was heroic and he should be proud of it. “Going to Vietnam was more heroic than my flying fighter jets, he was in harm's way and I wasn't.''
• When Matt Lauer asked President Bush if the war on terror could be won in four years or ever the President replied, “I don't think you can win it. I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world."
• "Had we to do it over again, we would look at the consequences of catastrophic success – being so successful, so fast, that an enemy that should have surrendered or been done in, escaped and lived to fight another day," he said to Time Magazine when asked about the aftermath of his Iraqi invasion.

Has the President been infected with a rare virus that compels the sufferer to speak the truth or is their another explanation for these remarks that sound more like they were spoken by John F. Kerry than by George W, Bush? I don’t think that the uncharacteristic candor of these remarks is the product of a sudden compulsion to level with the American people. There is another explanation.

I think is was Mark Twain who suggested that political leaders often waited to see which way the people were going and then hurried to get in front of them. That is the more likely rationale behind the President’s admissions. Polling shows that the President is being held accountable for his surrogates’ attempts to denigrate Senator Kerry’s war service; that the American people expect terrorist attacks to go on and that it was a mistake to go into Iraq without a plan for peace. That is where the voters are going. The President is trying to get out front. In the Bush book that is called leadership.