Dick Cheney had a nice line in the vice-presidential debate on Tuesday. Noting that John Kerry and John Edwards had twisted themselves into pretzels over their views on Iraq back in the primaries because of the surging anti-war Democrat front-runner, Mr. Cheney scoffed that, if they can’t stand up to Howard Dean, how can we trust them to stand up to Al Qaeda?

Good point. Except that last week frustrated Republicans found themselves with the opposite dilemma: If President Bush can clobber Saddam Hussein and clobber the Taliban, why can’t he clobber an effete ninny like Mr. Kerry?

On Friday in St. Louis, the president came out swinging. A week earlier, he looked like a man woken up two hours after he’d gone to bed. This time ’round, someone shoveled an extra half-dozen spoonfuls in his percolator. Everything moved, except his face, whose expressions had been deemed too peevish, too pursed last time round.

I switched on CNN and some correspondent was gabbing away over the headline: “Botox Trial Verdict.” It wasn’t a report on the debate, but it might as well have been. The allegedly Botoxicated Kerry has an immobile forehead. One would assume it were some kind of laminate were it not for the sweat.

Mr. Bush’s forehead, meanwhile, was doing a good impression of Mr. Kerry’s: stiff and unmoving, and the effort required to keep it scowl-free apparently sharpened up all his other movements. It was a face-off without his face on.

The television pundits weren’t impressed. Mr. Bush is shouting, he’s too aggressive, he makes you uncomfortable in your living room, he’s too “hot” for a “cool” medium. I think not.

I wrote here last week that Mr. Bush owed the American people a “performance.” TV types define performance very narrowly – the kind of accomplished blandness of a smooth news anchor or financial reporter or weather girl, and they tend to measure political performance in news industry terms, too. But what the over caffeinated Mr. Bush communicated on Friday was his passion, his energy, his resolve, his sense of humor, and his authenticity. If he yells and waves his arms around too much to make a convincing weather girl, big deal.

Mr. Kerry, on the other hand, was accomplished only in news-smoothie terms. At Friday’s debate, the senator pledged that he wouldn’t raise taxes on families earning over $200,000.Then he gazed out over the audience and said, “And looking around here, at this group here, I suspect there are only three people here who are going to be affected: the president, me, and Charlie, I’m sorry, you too,” he added, chuckling clubbily with the debate moderator, ABC News anchor Charles Gibson.

Well, he has a point. Mr. Bush is a millionaire, Mr. Gibson’s a zillionaire, and Mr. Kerry’s a multigazillionaire. But how can you tell by looking at people that they earn under 200 grand? And, even if you can, is it such a great idea to let ’em know they look like working stiffs and chain-store schlubs? But, when you’ve married two heiresses, it’s kind of hard to tell where the losers with mere six-figure incomes begin: It’s like the 97-year-old who calls the guys in late middle age “Sonny.”

In America, quite a few fairly regular families earn 200 grand and an awful lot more families hope to be in that bracket one day. And, more importantly, the sheer condescension of assuming that the room divides into the colossi of the politico-news ruling class and everyone else sums up everything that’s wrong with the modern Democratic Party.

But Mr. Kerry’s condescending reassurances on his tax increases prefigured his disastrous performance on the other domestic issues. It’s not just that Bush was almost unnervingly competent on so-called Democratic topics like the environment, but that Mr. Kerry was quite staggeringly patronizing and incoherent on issues like stem-cell research and abortion. The point here is that on, say, the disgusting practice of partial-birth abortion – which is really partial-birth infanticide – Mr. Bush knows what he believes.

If Mr. Kerry believes anything on that subject – and given that the gung-ho partial birth crowd are big donors to his campaign, it’s wisest not to – he seems incapable of expressing it and his professions of deep respect for the female audience-members who asked the questions – “You know, Elizabeth, I really respect the feeling that’s in your question,” “I cannot tell you how deeply I respect the belief about life,” “I truly respect it” – make him sound like the greasiest snake-oil salesman.

Mr. Kerry is a remarkable candidate: After a 20-year career of consistently opposing the projection of American power, he’s chosen to run as a cipher. No wonder the press Big feet love him: Like them, he’s a leftie posing as an empty vessel. Mr. Bush, in an unashamedly Texan performance, restored the natural trend in this race: The president remains on course to win the states he won in 2000 plus Wisconsin, maybe Iowa, Maine’s 2nd Congressional District, under the Pine Tree State’s split-spoils system, and a couple more to give him a respectable margin of victory.

And, if you want to know the real difference, after 90 minutes of debate it came in the final exchange of the night:

“The truth of that matter,” said Mr. Bush, “is, if you listen carefully, Saddam would still be in power if he were the president of the United States.”

Mr. Kerry replied: “Not necessarily.”

That’s Mr. Kerry: the “not necessarily” candidate. Saddam might not necessarily be in power. He might have been hit by the Number 37 bus while crossing the street at the intersection of Saddam Hussein Boulevard and Saddam Hussein Parkway in downtown Tikrit. He might have put his back out with one of his more vigorous concubines and been forced to hand over to Uday or Qusay. He might have stiffed President Chirac in some backdoor deal and been taken out by some anthrax-laced box of his favorite Quality Street toffees planted by an elite French commando unit.

But, on the other hand, not necessarily. That’s the difference: Mr. Bush believes America needs to shape events in the world; Kerry doesn’t, and, even if he did, because he doesn’t know how he’d want to shape them, the events would end up shaping him. There would be lots of discussion. Frenchmen would be involved. And, in the end, President Kerry could claim that however things turned out was what he wanted all along because, on Saddam and Iran and North Korea and a whole lot more, who the hell can say with confidence what Mr. Kerry wants anyway? How it would all turn out is anybody’s guess. And on November 2, America won’t be in a mood to vote for a guess.