Daily Blague

Because I was on the subway at the time, I didn't take good notes of the Eureka moment, but I saw, as the IRT rumbled northward yesterday, that the key to George W Bush's appeal (to those who find him appealing) may be that he is known to have experienced rebirth. At the age of forty (this would have been in 1986), the future president stopped drinking alcohol, an act of will that heralded his overall spiritual regeneration. The mean-spirited frat boy, best-known as an enforcer of loyalty to his father, became the very nice man we see today, with the help of Jesus and a loving wife.

What I grasped on the subway was not the truth of this fairy tale, but its urgency for millions of Americans - American men especially. The sacrament of rebirth, which would have been scoffed at by our grandfathers, has become a crucial part of the American way ever since Jimmy Carter confessed to lust in his heart. Nobody cared if he was saved, it's true, but his successor in the White House, Ronald Reagan, transmuted good old American reinvention into something more transcendental, at least in the eyes of his admirers. The traditional understanding of character, as a trait just as God-given and inalterable as one's height or one's gender, was junked for a more flexible model. Nowadays, character is little more than an opportunistic aptitude for recognizing and seizing second chances. And nobody has more of that than Mr Bush, who, after all, must have spent a good part of his youth trying to convince his elders that he would really behave this time.

From the rehabilitation of fraudulent, philandering televangelists to the other day's "accountability moment," America has been demonstrating for twenty-odd years now that it is besotted by faith in fresh starts. What Bush may have had over Kerry last fall was a reputation for whipping inner demons. Mr Kerry's inner demons, if he had any, were too polite, too prone to speak French during exorcisms. What Americans want just now is a former screw-up who can convince us that he will never screw up again.

Never screw up exactly how?