President Bush struck two distinct notes in last night’s State of the Union address — the compassionate conservative at home and the steely wartime leader abroad. It was a stellar performance designed to help widen his appeal beyond the traditional Republican base. One could almost see the electoral coalition for the Bush 2004 re-election campaign being cobbled together. There was something for free-market conservatives: acceleration of income tax rate cuts and a swipe at the “trial lawyers” driving up health care costs. There was something for social conservatives: a ban on human cloning and on partial-birth abortion. There was something for environmentalists: “1.2 billion dollars in research funding so that America can lead the world in developing clean, hydrogen-powered automobiles.” Something for the African-American community: $15 billion to fight AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean. And even some things on issues that the Democrats traditionally own, such as $600 million for additional drug treatment and $450 million to mentor “disadvantaged junior-high students and children of prisoners.”

Some of these policy proposals seem reminiscent of President Clinton in the way they are narrowly tailored and seem aimed at swaying specific groups of potential swing voters. But it’s hard to blame Mr. Bush for learning from Mr. Clinton’s political successes — or, for that matter, from those of Governor Pataki, who won re-election in New York by catering to traditionally Democratic constituencies such as Latinos and labor unions. On the merits, drug rehabilita tion is better considered a state responsibility, or as a matter for private health insurance. Mentoring programs have been in place for decades through voluntary groups without federal funding. And if there’s a way to make hydrogen-powered automobiles, it just might be that Detroit or Silicon Valley can figure it out faster, and cheaper, than Washington can. Still, if the political price of the tax cut is some spending increases, the president seems bent on taking a page from Ronald Reagan’s book, not Newt Gingrich’s.

In the foreign-policy section of the speech, Mr. Bush went out of his way to correct some of his past errors. Soon after September 11, Mr. Bush gave a speech that said the terrorists follow in the path of “all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century … fascism, Nazism, and totalitarianism.” Last night, Mr. Bush corrected his error of euphemization, naming “the ambitions of Hitlerism, militarism, and communism.” We’re not quite sure what he means by “militarism,” but it is nice to see the president take on communism directly. Similarly, the president made a high-profile statement encouraging the freedom-fighters in Iran, an issue that has been wrongly relegated to the backburner by the Bush administration.”The United States supports their aspirations to live in freedom,” Mr. Bush said of Iranians. If the support goes beyond words, he’ll be heard in Iran the way Natan Sharansky reminds us that Mr. Reagan was heard in the Gulag Archipelago.

Where Mr. Bush really soared, however, was on Iraq. It’s a mistake, in our view, for America to return to Turtle Bay, as Mr. Bush last night announced his intention to do. The Security Council, whose members include Syria and France, is discredited. But Mr. Bush laid the groundwork for action without yet another stamp of approval from the United Nations. He disclosed new details on how Saddam Hussein is engaged in deceit. “Thousands of Iraqi security personnel are at work hiding documents and materials from the U.N. inspectors — sanitizing inspection sites and monitoring the inspectors themselves,” Mr. Bush said. “Iraqi intelligence officers are posing as the scientists inspectors are supposed to interview.” And Mr. Bush did not back away from his formulation that Saddam is “evil,” enumerating the methods used in the torture chambers of Iraq: “electric shock, burning with hot irons, dripping acid on the skin, mutilation with electric drills, cutting out tongues, and rape.”

More clearly than he has so far, Mr. Bush outlined our war aims in Iraq by speaking of America’s character and mission. “America is a strong nation, and honorable in the use of our strength. We exercise power without conquest, and we sacrifice for the liberty of strangers. Americans are a free people, who know that freedom is the right of every person and the future of every nation. The liberty we prize is not America’s gift to the world, it is God’s gift to humanity,” he said, in words that made us proud to be Americans, and proud that he is our president.