President Bush was responding, on Thursday, to a challenge to his leadership rather directly formulated. The anvil was of course the polls, which show Mr. Bush having lost three points in his overall job approval rating in the past month, and receiving only 42% approval for his foreign policy.

The president correctly dismissed the poll numbers as telling nothing about any strategic vulnerability. He said that concern for the polls is “kind of like a dog chasing your tail.” He had that dog chasing the wrong tail. But whatever his feelings about the polls, he did call the previously unscheduled press conference, full-blown and wreaking havoc on organized television watchers.

Viewers had been advised that the president would accost two phenomena. The first, the high price of fuel; the second, the impasse on Social Security reform.

With respect to energy, Mr. Bush didn’t really contribute anything that could lay claim to being a new “energy policy.” In fact, Mr. Bush correctly said that the United States hasn’t had an energy policy, and feinted at parricide by saying that “10 years” ago we didn’t have an energy policy, 10 years taking us back pretty close to Bush 41.

So what did he stress? The need to encourage the oil-producing nations to increase their output.

The trouble with this goodfella approach to OPEC is that it hasn’t worked in the past and isn’t likely to work in the future. Oil prices tend to adjust to the demands of the world market, and these increase, for oil, every day. The OPEC powers tend to marshal their resources to maximize their profits.

Yet any analysis of oil prices that relies exclusively on commercial data isn’t reliable. OPEC is a supra-economic structure, a weapon of mass destruction devised by the Shah of Iran. We have to remind ourselves, in contemplating the threat of nuclear reactors in Iran, that the mullahs’ motives for building nuclear power plants in Iran aren’t plausibly their need for more power. Iran is not running out of oil.

The president did mention ancillary goals, including terminals that can handle liquefied natural gas, and he spoke of the need to encourage a decrease in the consumption of fossil fuel, and an increase in the development of alternatives, with the usual bow to hydrogen fuel and oblique reference to our huge coal deposits.

But what the president was not about to do was endorse a program that could actually affect the soaring price of fuel. The only way to reduce fuel consumption is to increase the cost of it, and to do that argues exactly contrary to the tribulations the president is seeking to assuage. The American people are annoyed/vexed/angry over high gas prices, but the only way to diminish the consumption of fuel is to increase gas prices yet more. This is not the energy policy that the president wanted to launch.

It is instructive that the reporters at the press conference – a full house – pressed Mr. Bush hardly at all on energy policy. That reflects in part the sense of futility in pursuing a policy question the only effective answer to which is excluded by rudimentary political considerations.

What the president did do, which is of enormous consequence, was introduce the idea of a means test for recipients of Social Security. Was he suggesting an income level after which payments would reduce, or even end? Not quite. “In beginning to talk specifically about the need to cut benefits – a topic that politicians over the years have learned can be toxic to their careers – Mr. Bush was making good on his promise to expend political capital in pursuit of big goals.”

But, the New York Times’ writer reminded the political community, it is one thing to have grand thoughts for grand programs, another, as in the search for the problem of fuel, to crystallize them into concrete proposals. The Congress, under the tight supervision of Senator Charles Grassley, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, is at work on Social Security reform, and it didn’t make sense for President Bush to come up with proposals athwart those of Senator Grassley. If it is to be a fight between a Republican chief executive and a Republican Congress, let that happen another day.

As president of the United States, Mr. Bush is in full swing. He is confident in his role, assertive in his recommendations, and here and there very shrewd in his answers, as when he distinguished between faith-based opposition to judicial nominees and opposition based on judicial philosophy. The conference might have the desired effect of bolstering the poll figures, and redirecting the tail the dog is going after.