"We Must Proceed With Great Care"

Sunday, Aug. 12, 2001 By NANCY GIBBS AND MICHAEL DUFFY
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If Bush's goal was to sand the hard edges off his presidency, recover some standing with soccer moms after spooking them with arsenic and oil wells and ozone levels, then how he decided mattered almost as much as what he decided. In fact, that was the subtext of the whole speech. He laid out his own internal debate, lingered respectfully over arguments on both sides, showed how he had tried to wrestle the contradictions to the ground. He seemed earnest and engaged on a brutally hard issue--this from the man who for much of the year has seemed auto-piloted, anti-intellectual, far too playful and a few shifts short of hardworking. On top of everything else, Bush needed to reassure the vast middle ground of Americans that he could be trusted with the job they didn't really give him in the first place. "I have made this decision with great care," he said, "and I pray it is the right one."

And this is where the science actually helped him. The harder the issue, the more acceptable he would seem if he could just stay afloat and move through the murky waters. It takes less than the 11 minutes Bush spoke to see that this is a hard call, one we can't leave to either the scientists or the priests. It's why we have Presidents; more directly, it's why we need a wise one. On Thursday night, Bush almost seemed as if he was auditioning for the job he won last December.

With reporting by Andrew Goldstein/New York