President Bush delivered an impressive speech on the last night of the Republican Convention.

He talked about resolve, about protecting the country and about repairing the damage done by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

But he talked about the country as if the months and years since Sept. 11 had never happened.

Violence in Iraq continues unabated. The flow of U.S. casualties has not slowed. There are large pockets of instability and no clear strategy for dealing with a growing insurgency. One day the U.S. military is poised to deliver a decisive blow, the next a deal allows gunmen to escape back into the crowd.

The situation in Afghanistan remains fragile and dangerous. Warlords and drug runners dominate the areas outside of the capital, Kabul. And while a terrible blow has been landed against the Taliban and al-Qaida, they are still a significant enough threat to justify near martial law in Boston and New York during the political conventions.

President Bush says that 75 percent of al-Qaida has been captured or killed, but Osama bin Laden remains a fugitive and a danger to the United States, even as he recruits new allies into his jihad.

On the domestic front, President Bush promised to constrain government spending and reduce the deficit. He also promised a list of new expenditures and chided Sen. John Kerry as an out-of-control tax and spender. But privatizing Social Security comes with a big price tag. Making permanent Bush’s tax cuts has a big price tag. Remember, they already have played a significant part in turning a budget surplus into a budget deficit. And increasing funding for education, health savings accounts and other programs cost money.

Nowhere in the speech did the president address the difficulties the country faces in Iraq or Afghanistan or the difficulties the country faces at home.

Job numbers released Friday morning were less than robust. About 144,000 new jobs were created in August, better than the 32,000 created in July and continuing a trend of uneven job growth. Unemployment declined, but only because more people gave up on trying to find work.

Wages are falling, more people find themselves in poverty and without health insurance, and the country has lost about 900,000 jobs since the president took office. Perhaps even more disturbing, the president projected there would be more than 1.5 million new jobs by this time. There aren’t and there’s no recognition that something has gone wrong with the plan.

Democratic candidate John Kerry spent his convention introducing himself to the country. Unfortunately, he focused almost exclusively on his service in Vietnam.

President Bush’s convention focused on tearing Kerry down. He offered neither an explanation for the last three-and-a-half years or a detailed agenda for the future. Until the president’s own speech, convention organizers where content to disqualify Kerry, going so far as to make outlandish charges that he would leave the country’s defense in the hands of Paris. What’s needed is more serious debate, not rhetorical excess.

The strongest, most compelling part of the president’s speech was toward the end, when he spoke passionately about the “transforming power of liberty” and the “call to advance freedom.” Bush made a strong case for using U.S. military power abroad, a sharp turn from his 2000 campaign when he derided nation building.

Two questions will dominate the last two months of this campaign. National security and the economy. President Bush has a case to make that he should be re-elected. But to make the case credibly, he needs to acknowledge that things aren’t going as swimmingly as he had hoped – in Iraq, in Afghanistan and in the workplace – and explain how he intends to make things better.