President Bush had a little back-and-forth with the press yesterday at an event announcing the appointment of businessman Randall Tobias to head his AIDS initiative. While Mr. Bush’s speeches are sometimes the product of endless negotiations between factions within his administration, his remarks yesterday were unscripted, and therefore illuminating about what the president himself thinks.

Asked about the Middle East, Mr. Bush connected it to a core principle. “When it comes to the AIDS initiative, we believe in human dignity, we also believe that everybody ought to live in free societies, too,” Mr. Bush said. He said he is optimistic about Iraq’s future “because I believe that people want to be free. I believe it’s in the nature of the individual to love freedom and embrace freedom.”

It’s a timely message as we prepare to mark the annual anniversary of the issuance of those timeless words of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

There’s a long leap between stating publicly that “everybody ought to live in free societies” and running American policy in such a way that the world actually moves in that direction. There are plenty of debates about tactics. But such a clear enunciation of the goal — “everybody ought to live in free societies” — will go a way toward inspiring the modern-day Washingtons the world over and toward striking fear into the hearts of the modern-day King Georges.