It doesn’t get more dramatic than the contrast in leadership on display yesterday. On the one hand was the woman who would be president, Hillary Rodham Clinton, confronting the liberals in her own party over the question of the war – but stopping short of an inspiring defense of the great expedition on which we have sent our troops. On the other was the president, the commander-in-chief, swooping down into the battle zone in the wake of the killing of Zarqawi and offering not only congratulations to the new government of Iraq but a soaring reassurance to American GIs and free Iraqi forces fighting alongside them.

We are not without a streak of admiration for Mrs. Clinton and sympathy for her predicament. She must be doing something right if she’s being booed and jeered by anti-war leftists, as she was at the parley of progressives where she spoke in Washington. In its own kind of way it was what is called a Sister Souljah moment, a reference to the encounter in which her husband, in the 1992 campaign, confronted a racial demagogue in his party. Mrs. Clinton spoke to a group called the Campaign for America’s Future where, because of her relatively strong stance on the war, she was jeered repeatedly, including when she left the stage. It’s not an audience we’d wish on any senator, and we salute her for a certain kind of courage.

When it comes to war leadership, however, her remarks were thin gruel. “I do not think it is a smart strategy either for the president to continue with his open-ended commitment, which I think does not put enough pressure on the new Iraqi government, nor do I think it is smart strategy to set a date certain. I do not agree that that is in the best interest of our troops or our country,” Mrs. Clinton said, according to a report by ABC News, which said she also decried the Bush administration’s rush to war. She also reportedly said that standing up to death squads and militias in Iraq is “not the job of the American military.”

Mrs. Clinton didn’t specify the alternative to either an “open-ended commitment” or a “date certain.” Nor did she explain why it would be a good idea for an American president to subject the already fragile new Iraqi government, our ally in a vast struggle, to increased public “pressure.” If Mrs. Clinton and her foreign policy advisers are casting about for someone to “pressure,” how about the Syrians and Saudis and Iranians who are inspiring and aiding those death squads and militias in Iraq?

What a contrast with President Bush, who, on his surprise trip to Iraq, spoke to the American troops in soaring, stark terms about the enemy, whom he described as having an “ideology that is dark and dismal.” It is, he said, “one that doesn’t respect human dignity. It’s an ideology that doesn’t believe in the freedom to worship. It’s an ideology that doesn’t respect the role and rights of women in society. It’s an ideology that has no hope,” Mr. Bush said.

“The way to defeat that ideology is with an ideology of light,” Mr. Bush said. “I believe in the universality of freedom. I believe deep in everybody’s soul is the desire to be free. …People will look back at this period and wonder whether or not America was true to its beginnings, whether we strongly believed in the universality of freedom, and whether we were willing to act on it. Certainly we acted in our own self-interest right after September the 11th; and now we act not only in our own self-interests, but in the interests of men, women and children in the broader Middle East, no matter what their religion, no matter where they were born, no matter how they speak.”

Compare that to Mrs. Clinton, who believes, apparently, in the universality of freedom – but not in an “open-ended commitment” to it. And, as the event at which she spoke yesterday reminded so emphatically, she’s among the more hawkish, the most admirable of the Congressional Democrats; Senator Kerry spoke at the same event referring to Iraq as a Vietnam-like “quagmire.” The Republicans in Congress are mostly on board with the president. The chairman of the House International Relations Committee, Rep. Henry Hyde of Illinois, on Monday introduced a resolution “Declaring that the United States will prevail in the Global War on Terror, the struggle to protect freedom from the terrorist adversary.”

One gets the sense at times that for Mr. Bush the war is about the “ideology of light” and freedom and soul-craft, whereas for Mrs. Clinton it is about politics and point-scoring and navigating between a Democratic primary electorate and a more conservative general electorate. If she goes on in this vein the booing and jeering won’t just be coming from the anti-war left but from the broad center, the consensus of America that does believe in what Mr. Bush called the universality of freedom, an idea that has been etched into the bedrock of this nation since its Declaration of Independence was issued in the midst of another controversial war more than two centuries ago.