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The same zigzag pattern goes for foreign affairs, where Bush takes his father's pragmatic internationalism and injects it with muscular rhetoric aimed at America's erstwhile enemies in the Kremlin. Bush would cut aid to Moscow as long as it wages war on its own people in places like Chechnya, and he would abrogate the ABM Treaty of 1972 in order to build a Star Wars antiballistic-missile-defense system, whether Russia likes it or not. But Bush is no Buchananite America Firster. "The fearful build walls," he likes to say; "the confident tear them down." That's shorthand for a policy that would make trade with China a priority and human-rights abuses by Beijing's communist regime an afterthought.
The key to Bush's success--in the coming debates and then in the primaries--is selling the whole package. "People don't have to agree with you on every issue," says Karl Rove, Bush's chief strategist, "but they need to know you're a strong leader they can trust." Even as McCain surges in New Hampshire and Forbes tries to outorganize him in Iowa, Bush is confident he's getting the larger, thematic message across. Confident, but not complacent. Bush adjourned the meeting in the solarium last Wednesday after just 45 min. But as he left with his family to spend Thanksgiving with his parents in Houston, he took along some reading: a 3-in.-thick briefing book loaded with all the questions and zingers he can expect to have thrown his way in the New Hampshire debate. "He's ready," said an aide, "but he will read the briefing book."
--With reporting by John F. Dickerson/Washington