What Presidents Are For

Politically, the power of incumbency could give Gore a boost, with voters preferring the candidate who would need no on-the-job training. A President Gore could go to Egypt and mediate right now; a President Bush, who has shown little interest in foreign policy over the years, could not, and even in the future would likely rely heavily on subordinates. Or conversely, the crisis could focus attention on the Clinton-Gore failure to bring peace to the Middle East. Already, Bush is moving to tie the situation to his criticism of military readiness and the administration's energy policy.

Both candidates have seen their campaign game plans disrupted. The Gore message of the week--that Bush chose tax cuts over children's health in Texas, just as he would in Washington--was lost somewhere amid all the images of shattered hulls and grieving families. And Bush didn't get quite as much momentum out of his strong showing in the second debate as he might have otherwise.

At the same time, Bush is fortunate that he proved he could hold his own on foreign policy (which consumed nearly an hour of the debate) before the crisis highlighted the issue. Had he not done so, he would be on the defensive this week.

Bush is weighing his words on the situation, but occasionally he says something that sheds light on how his mind works. "Terror is the enemy. Uncertainty is the enemy," he said in Pennsylvania last week. "That's why I want our nation to develop an antiballistic-missile system... to bring certainty into this uncertain world." Condoleezza Rice, the governor's foreign-policy adviser, said that Bush was imagining an escalation of the crisis to where, say, Iraq threatened Israel or the United States with missiles. But others argued that last week's events were, if anything, an example of the limits of certainty and the inadequacy of missile defense, which (even if it eventually works) could obviously do nothing to stop a boat loaded with explosives from hitting the soft underbelly of American power. And what if the terrorists' boat had contained weapons of mass destruction?

By demonstrating some knowledge of foreign policy in the debate, Bush may well have neutralized any political advantage Gore held. But the actual difference between them in fluency and experience is large. During his nearly quarter century in public life, Gore has assiduously studied national-security issues. He has arguably played the most significant foreign-policy role of any vice president in history, negotiating agreements that denuclearized Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan; diverted Russian weapons scientists to peaceful occupations; secured more open trade relations, and addressed global health and environmental problems.

Bush, by contrast, is hampered not just by his lack of formal Washington experience. Until recently, Mexico was the only country outside the United States that seemed to engage his interest; he has visited the Middle East once, in 1998 (one of only three trips he has taken overseas in his life). He did not take advantage of his father's presidency to familiarize himself with foreign policy, though he has obviously been studying up lately. "Bush would come to the presidency less prepared than any president since Warren Harding," says Alan Brinkley, professor of history at Columbia University.