Back in January of 2004, when President Bush gave his State of the Union address, he spoke out about steroids in baseball. “Athletics play such an important role in our society, but, unfortunately, some in professional sports are not setting much of an example,” Mr. Bush said. “The use of performance-enhancing drugs like steroids in baseball, football, and other sports is dangerous, and it sends the wrong message — that there are shortcuts to accomplishment, and that performance is more important than character. So tonight I call on team owners, union representatives, coaches, and players to take the lead, to send the right signal, to get tough, and to get rid of steroids now.”

Mr. Bush’s comments at the time met with widespread derision. “Ninety-nine words on steroids and not one word about manufacturing jobs,” harrumphed Senator Kerry, the Democrat of Massachusetts who was running for president. “Ninety-nine words on steroids and not one word about weapons of mass destruction.” An editorial in the New York Times said, “Mr. Bush, who devoted an entire paragraph to decrying the use of steroids in sports, stands second to nobody when it comes to tiny symbolic gestures. Many of his larger thoughts, meanwhile, were vague to the point of meaninglessness. (His references to energy and the environment took up less time than the anti-steroid agenda.)”

The San Francisco Chronicle’s Washington bureau chief reported in a “news analysis,” “With millions of Americans battling alcoholism and hard drug abuse, with Iraq in turmoil, Osama bin Laden at large and millions of Americans out of work, Democrats have ridiculed Bush’s focus on steroids.” It was all-too-typical of the tendency of the liberal establishment to belittle Mr. Bush for whatever he might say or do, even though, in this case, he once owned a baseball team, the Texas Rangers.

Now that the Mitchell report has bared in official detail the full extent of baseball’s problems with performance-enhancing drugs, and the story has landed on the front pages of newspapers nationwide, Mr. Bush’s 2004 comments look to us not like a tiny symbolic gesture but sheer prophesy. Let the Democrats complain and the New York Times editorialists poke fun. The steroids scandal, like so many issues, was one our president was years ahead of the curve in understanding. The man so often mocked once again gets it right. How many times does this have to happen before people stop misunderestimating him?