The father of President Bush the Second called it “the vision thing” -- which he was widely presumed to lack. By early 1987, Time magazine reported, George H. W. Bush was using that phrase “in clear exasperation.” Then, as now, journalists seemed to clamor for presidential candidates to seem visionary.

     Many politicians have grandly quoted from the Book of Proverbs: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” The biblical invocation plays into the media-fed notion that great leaders succeed when they persevere according to their own lights.

     But such popularized concepts of political leadership -- encouraged by countless journalists -- are long on vision and short on hearing. With apparent self-assurance, politicians often have a way of filtering out the messages they don’t want to hear, even from their own supporters.

     President Lyndon Johnson epitomized the alpha and omega of a leader’s visionary determination. To his enormous credit, he pushed hard for civil rights legislation soon after becoming president. But meanwhile, he plunged ahead with the Vietnam War -- and he didn’t want to hear what many people,

U.S. Cong. Dennis Kucinich has scored a resounding victory in the online straw poll held by alternative news site Truthout.org. With almost 25,000 votes cast, the maverick Presidential candidate from Ohio had secured 44.5% of the total, more than 12 points ahead of his closest rival, former Vermont Governor Howard Dean. For the Kucinich campaign, this is a significant development. Truthout is frequented by many mainstream progressives, similar to the constituency that gave Dean an impressive victory in last Spring's MoveOn.org poll.

Anyone who doubts former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's recent claims that President Bush mislead the public and secretly planned the Iraq war eight months before the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 needs to read the two letters sent to then President Bill Clinton in 1998 and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich by current members of the Bush administration urging Clinton to launch a preemptive strike against Iraq.

Back then, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz and other pro-war hawks lobbied Clinton and Gingrich to remove former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein from power using military force and indict him as a "war criminal." Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, both of whom were working in the private sector at the time, were affiliated with the right-wing think tank Project for a New American Century, which was founded by Weekly Standard editor William Kristol in 1997 to promote America's foreign and defense policies.

You'd think that President Bush would be facing, to quote Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, a long, hard slog in his bid to recapture the White House for a second term what with all the information trickling out of the president's administration the past few months showing that senior administration officials knowingly mislead the American public about the reasons for launching a preemptive attack against Iraq.

But, unfortunately, there's too much infighting taking place among the nine Democrats campaigning for their party's presidential nomination and not enough attention to the administration's misdeeds. Too bad, because this is the type of ammunition that even the weakest Democratic candidate should be able to easily spin to convince voters that Bush should be replaced come November.

AUSTIN, Texas -- In Texas, where the border is a constant presence in our lives, no one is mistaking President Bush's immigration proposal for a brilliant new departure in immigration policy, or even for a ploy to get Hispanic political support. What we have here is the old bracero program, a guest worker program, and it primarily benefits one group and one group only -- big business. And that would be OK, if other parts of the program totaled up to a net improvement in the current situation. That's what we need to look at and weigh.