The president says it again.(on the right)

NEW YORK, MAY 30

THE broad shoulders of a national election loom just ahead. It is traditional to deplore elections as distracting from courses charted by celestial coordinates. Sure; okay; much of this is true. But elections also ratify, or fail to do so, politicians who have set forth national policy.

There are two great issues on which November 2006 will pronounce. The first has to do with spending. The voter reminds himself that all money bills, by constitutional direction, have to originate in the House of Representatives. Is he then going to punish for wild spending whatever incumbent is within his reach? Perhaps the voters will be permissive with Congress--on the grounds that the president, after all, was there with a veto power he never exercised. Will they satisfy themselves with sending the legislators back for another session and storing up their resentment to be used against the GOP in 2008?

Overhanging all other concerns is the war in Iraq. That, the voter will tell himself, is the work of one man: the outgoing president. It is not easy to punish a lame duck, but one way is to bring in as his successor a chief executive from the other political party. So that even 2 1/2 years before Election Day 2008, party strategists are thinking about Iraq.

Certainly George Bush is doing so. At West Point on May 27, he spoke to the graduating class, the first class to have matriculated at the academy after September 11.

There was not a hint of retrenchment on the military, the historical, or the ideological front. Mr. Bush reiterated the line set down by Truman. "He told the Congress: 'It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.'"

Mr. Bush cited the early costs of this doctrine. "More than 54,000 Americans gave their lives in Korea. Yet, in ...