Critics yelped that there was nothing new in President Bush’s “plan for victory” speech at the Naval Academy last week. In the strict sense, they were right: The speech was a reiteration of Mr. Bush’s longstanding position that the exit strategy for Iraq is victory.

But at the very least the president’s speech served to remind everybody that the critics have no plan of their own, beyond Rep. Jack Murtha’s demand for an immediate withdrawal of all American forces. That’s such a disastrous idea that even most Democrats have distanced themselves from it.

The speech may also have marked a turning point in the administration’s very belated response to some of the most shocking and irresponsible attacks on a president since the isolationist fringe accused Franklin Roosevelt of manipulating the United States into World War II. It’s one thing to criticize the administration’s strategy or the president’s “victory” rhetoric. But it’s quite another to charge that the president and Vice President Cheney deliberately lied America into an unwinnable war.

The bipartisan commission investigating prewar intelligence reported no evidence that the intelligence community was pressured to skew its findings. Then there were all those embarrassing prewar statements by Democrats themselves: In a nutshell, they voted for it before they voted against it.

Thus Michigan’s Carl Levin, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee and the second-ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, recently accused the administration of “deception” in the march to war. But before the war he was saying on CNN that “the war against terrorism will not be finished as long as (Saddam Hussein) is in power.”

True, Mr. Levin went on to say “that does not mean (Saddam) is the next target.” But what we have there is a dispute over timing and tactics, not the honesty of a president. Presidents, unlike senators, are always in the position of having to act on ambiguous evidence – one reason, perhaps, that Bill Clinton bombed what turned out to be an aspirin factory in the Sudan.

One speech won’t shake the media’s current story line, which is that America is stuck in a quagmire. When moderate Democrat Joe Lieberman last week made the case for staying the course in Iraq, the press yawned – unlike the fawning attention it gave to Jack Murtha. Mr. Lieberman’s point of view didn’t fit the story line.

Is it any wonder that polls show such skepticism about the Iraq venture? Few Americans are given any of the favorable news from Iraq: the double-digit surge in the Iraqi economy over the last year; the steady attrition of the terrorist leadership in the Sunni triangle by brave American and, increasingly, Iraqi troops; the impressive turnout for elections, another of which is scheduled for next week; the relative peace and quiet that exists in 80% of the country.

President Bush took too long to focus public attention on some of these things. But Democrats may be having second thoughts themselves. In recent weeks their leaders lurched perilously close to linking their fate to that of the “black box” left – the Michael Moore Democrats for whom no conspiracy theory about George W. Bush and Dick Cheney is too wild. Senator Lieberman’s op-ed said nothing new either, but its timing clearly reflected a desire to yank Democrats back to reality.

If the adults in the Democratic Party don’t stay focused on legitimate debate about the war – what constitutes “victory,” for example – they could easily find their own credibility in the tank.

Mr. Bray is a Detroit News columnist.