WINNING.(The Talk of the Town)

About a third of the way into last Thursday's Presidential debate, the moderator, Jim Lehrer, asked President George W. Bush to clarify a comment that he had made the previous month. Bush had used the term "miscalculation" in connection with American plans for a post-invasion Iraq, and Lehrer wanted to know what he meant by that. It turned out that the President had been referring not to the ferocity of Iraqi insurgents, or to the difficulties of reconstructing the country, or to the steadily mounting death toll, but to the extraordinary efficiency of the American military operation there.

"Because Tommy Franks did such a great job in planning the operation, we moved rapidly, and a lot of the Baathists and Saddam loyalists laid down their arms and disappeared, and we're fighting them now," Bush said, despite the fact that many, if not most, of the insurgents are neither. "And it's hard work. I understand how hard it is. I get the casualty reports every day. I see on the TV screens how hard it is." The President went on, "I'm optimistic. See, I think you can be realistic and optimistic at the same time."

Four years ago, Bush campaigned on a slogan borrowed from his home town of Midland, Texas--"The sky's the limit"--and he seems, if anything, to have grown more attached to it the more events conspire against him. Last week's news out of Iraq was typical. American forces launched an offensive in Samarra after negotiations to allow them back into the city failed. On a videotape provided by the kidnappers who had recently beheaded two Americans, the British hostage Kenneth Bigley pleaded for his life from inside a cage. A private security firm reported that insurgents had launched two thousand three hundred and sixty-eight separate attacks over the previous thirty days, including two hundred and seventy-two using rocket-propelled grenades. Just hours before the debate began, three car bombs went off near an American military convoy in Baghdad, killing at least forty people, most of them children. (The children, who were at a celebration for the opening of a new sewage-treatment plant, were waiting for American soldiers to hand out candy.) "We've climbed the mighty mountain," the President intoned in his closing remarks of the debate. "I see the valley below, and it's a valley of peace."

As the Presidential race enters its final month, it is Bush's posture toward the war in Iraq, almost more than the war itself, that has become the campaign's central issue. A few days before the debate, Fox's Bill O'Reilly asked the President whether, if he could do it all over again, he would still land on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln and speak before a banner that read "Mission Accomplished." "Absolutely," Bush replied. (Even O'Reilly seemed taken aback. "You would?" he asked.) As one justification for the war after another has evaporated--a resourceful college student recently counted twenty-three different reasons ...