If your bumpersticker says DON’T BLAME ME, I VOTED FOR AYN RAND I'm not particularly impressed. ‘Cause she’s dead and none of that stuff is going to happen. Doesn’t mean we can’t keep the ideas in play, but if you don’t vote because no candidate vows to privatize the sewage systems and disband the Food and Drug Administration, don’t come crying to me when your marginal tax rate hits 71 percent.

These would-be psychoanalytical interpretations are condescending in character. They pay little regard to the complexity of the transatlantic political and democratic game, to the intensity and the quality of intellectual debate, and underestimate the intelligence and the analytical capacity of the American elites, notably the political ones. To believe that debate is non-existent in the United States you must know nothing of the history of the United States, never have visited Washington, be unaware of the quality of their think-tanks and never have surfed the Net. American political life is incontestably the most organized and the richest of all the democracies. American politicians are anything but amateurs. And George W. Bush is no more a simplistic cowboy than Ronald Reagan was.

The top allied commander also said the U.S. military, in a change in strategy, has decided to limit the scope of its raids in Iraq after receiving warnings from Iraqi leaders that the large military sweeps were alienating the public.

Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the chief commander of allied forces in Iraq, said in an interview in Thursday editions of The New York Times that the military had virtually exhausted the gains from the massive raid approach.

"It was a fact that I started to get multiple indicators that maybe our iron-fisted approach to the conduct of ops was beginning to alienate Iraqis," Sanchez said, referring to military operations.

Bush's tax cuts, as they emerged seriatim, proved to be aimed not just at reducing the government's revenue but also at changing the structure of the tax code to reduce personal rates and, especially, to reduce taxes on capital accumulation.