Democratic candidates haven’t defined as clear a plan to combat terrorism as the president has.

I celebrated a birthday recently, and I’m wondering whether the accumulation of years has brought me wisdom or just Hamletesque indecisiveness.

I seem to have acquired a capacity to see faults where I once might have overlooked them and skills where I never expected to find them. That may help explain my failure to find a presidential candidate I like much.

I have voted in every presidential election since 1968. The choices I’ve made never have been on a 100-0 scale. (Even candidates I have viscerally loathed have had a few qualities that made them semi-plausible.) On my sliding scale, one candidate might get 60 percent versus 40 percent for his opponent. But in presidential politics, 60 percent is a landslide, so the 60 man gets 100 percent of my single vote.

So far this year I haven’t found a candidate I want more than 40 percent. A few – Dennis Kucinich and Al Sharpton among them – have fallen close to zero, though Sharpton is the most fun to listen to. I’ve heard voters in past elections bemoan the quality of candidates, and I’ve often had at least a little sympathy for their complaints. But I knew I would make a choice by Election Day. I will make a 2004 choice, too, but not without adding to the already large number of gray hairs on my head.

In some ways, the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks – true to the cliche – changed everything for me. Having gone through the unspeakable pain of losing my nephew that day (he was on the first plane to hit the World Trade Center), I don’t want other families to experience what we have. That means terrorism must be disabled. So I’m paying lots of attention to America’s reaction to that crisis and to what candidates say on foreign policy.

What I find so frustrating is that Democratic candidates seem not to have offered the clarity of vision in this area that I found in President Bush’s Nov. 6 speech to the National Endowment for Democracy. Even if Bush simply read a speechwriter’s words, even if he didn’t get it all right, even if his actions frequently undermine his words, he at least articulated a wise, defensible policy in tune with the values Americans have always professed – however much our actions may violate those values.

I say that even though I’m no fan of Bush. He’s often arrogant, simplistic and a captive of dangerous ideologues. Many of his domestic policies, from education to the environment, are misguided and shortsighted. His tax policies seem at times to encourage the kind of rapacity that, when let loose in the private sector, brought down Enron and WorldCom. He seems almost willfully out of touch with people who weren’t born into wealthy family dynasties. I could go on.

But Bush often has been right about our need to battle terrorism – including its root causes – in part by promoting democracy. His errors, to be sure, have been huge. He sold the Iraq war on the wrong basis. It turned out not to be an extension of the war on terror or about weapons of mass destruction threatening the United States.

Still, it’s time for everyone, including some of the Democratic presidential candidates, to acknowledge that nothing anyone says can change the fact that America went to war in Iraq. That’s spilled milk.

It’s time instead to figure out what we can do there now to reach the best possible result and what we should do about the initial object of our wrath, Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terrorist network. Bush has been distracted from battling al-Qaeda (far from our only enemy), but I have hopes he can get back to this work and can avoid ordering the military to take down, say, Syria or Iran next.

Although I don’t buy all his conclusions, Jeffrey Record, a visiting professor at the Air War College, has provided a helpful way to think about getting our attention back to terrorism and its causes. His recent report, “Bounding the Global War on Terrorism,” calls Bush to task for not being clear about “the nature and parameters” of the war on terrorism. I buy Record’s criticism of parameters but not nature. Indeed, Bush has, as Record charges, defined the enemy one way yesterday, another today. And without capturing or killing bin Laden, he’s run after other targets.

It’s not clear to me that any Democratic candidate gets all this as right as the much-flawed Bush does. Either that or I’m just getting old and cranky.

Bill Tammeus is an editorial page columnist for The Kansas City Star.

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