President Bush has a plan – he says so in his stump speech, which is energizing partisan throngs across the country.

He has a plan to “make sure this economy not only grows this year, but in the years to come.” By curbing frivolous lawsuits, of course.

He has a plan “to make sure Americans have better health care and more affordable health care,” which he’ll do by promoting Association Health Plans.

Every now and again, Mr. Bush will mention his plan to close the minority homeownership gap. And, in case you’ve forgotten, he has an energy plan to secure our long-term prosperity.

Someone seems to have forgotten the “chicken-in-every-pot” plan, which will presumably be rolled out just before the convention.

For an administration accused of catastrophically poor planning in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is a curious symmetry to all this: No, we really do have a plan, a fact we will demonstrate through the repeated utterance of the talismanic word “plan.”

A more effective strategy might be muttering the word “plan” repeatedly over the airways, hypnotizing voters in their own homes and filling them with a mad, burning desire to vote for Mr. Bush’s re-election in November. This, however, might violate some obscure regulation of the Federal Communications Commission. The plans themselves are paltry at best. These are micro-initiatives, Clintonian in the worst sense. To date, they constitute the sum total of Mr. Bush’s domestic agenda, deep tax cuts and the culture war notwithstanding. Depressingly, the plans fail even on their own narrow terms.

Tort reform, useful though it may be, grows increasingly unlikely as congressional Republicans make their peace with the trial lawyers. A second Bush term could make relatively little difference on that front. Besides, it’s hard to imagine that tort reform is the key to economic growth as opposed to, say, an antitrust policy dedicated to competition and innovation, or serious investments in human capital. Health care is a pressing issue for the millions of uninsured Americans and the millions of others who have been and will be uninsured at some point, not to mention the insured Americans alarmed by rising costs, which, incidentally, adds up to many, many swing voters. But Mr. Bush offers only a fig leaf. Association Health Plans would add a whopping 330,000 Americans to the insurance rolls, according to the Congressional Budget Office, which would leave just 41 million Americans, give or take, without it. It’s difficult to spin this as a sweeping move.

Mr. Bush’s commitment to closing the minority homeownership gap is admirable, if you believe in race-conscious public policy – I don’t – but his means – no down payments for mortgages with insurance backed by the Federal Housing Administration – looks like a sure-fire recipe for defaults. As for the energy plan, with its generous subsidies to a veritable rainbow coalition of domestic energy concerns, Carter redux sounds about right.

The tragedy is that it didn’t need to be this way. There is nothing unconservative about government that works, a point Mr. Bush and Senator McCain made repeatedly during the 2000 campaign. Drift and neglect – the domestic policy the Bush administration has chosen by default – is itself unconservative in that it allows anxieties over health care, poverty, and the environment to grow until left-wing solutions gain a threshold level of credibility with the public.

Tax cuts, ironically enough, make matters worse: By taking the proverbial median voter off the income-tax rolls, big government solutions look like a free lunch. (Social Security payroll taxes, you’ll recall, pay for retirement.) Over time, the conservatives in the Bush administration are digging their own graves. Slowly but surely, the “emerging Democratic majority” touted by John Judis and Ruy Texeira becomes a reality.

The alternative is clear. What Mr. Bush badly needs is “the vision thing.” When it comes to the war on terrorism, Mr. Bush has vision in spades. That’s not enough. Whether we like it or not, social mobility is no longer the defining characteristic of American life. Along that metric, we’ve fallen behind what were once the calcified, class-bound societies of Western Europe. The very well off, most of whom richly deserve their success, are increasingly able to pass on their advantages, and their all-important social capital, to their offspring. The risk is that we will become more and more like the stratified Europe of the past. A robust statism will surely follow this development. Social division plus socialism is, suffice to say, the worst of all possible worlds.

To prevent this from happening, conservatives need to make work pay for the very poor, provide health insurance for those who don’t have it, and support the men and women who make serious financial sacrifices to raise children. How to describe this vision? Think of it as giving Edmund Burke’s little platoons the guns and ammo they so richly deserve. In the old days, we called it compassionate conservatism.