Mark Steyn on why the Bush poll numbers have increased after the events of the last month:

That's why even the old quagmire scenario now playing 24/7 on the cable channels doesn't work for Kerry. Visiting foreigners often remark on that popular T-shirt slogan, usually found below the Stars and Stripes: "These Colors Don't Run." To non-Americans, it seems a trifle touchy. But for a quarter-century the presumption of the country's enemies was that those colors did run -- they ran from Vietnam, from the downed choppers in the Iranian desert, from Mogadishu. Even the successful campaigns -- the inconclusively concluded Gulf War and the air-only Kosovo war -- seemed designed to avoid putting those colors in the position of having to run. As Osama saw it, these colors ran from the African embassy bombings, and the Khobar towers, and he pretty much expected them to run from 9/11, too.

A narrow majority of Americans get this: Being seen not to run -- or, if you prefer, being seen to show ''resolve'' -- is now an indispensable objective of U.S. foreign policy. So, when four contractors get lynched and hung off a bridge in Fallujah, poor foolish Sen. Robert Byrd may think it's time for an ''exit strategy,'' but most Americans want to see the thugs who did it hunted down and killed.

...The left resists this analysis. ''Resolve,'' they say, may sound macho but it's also simplistic. Not necessarily. In today's phony-baloney world, nuanced inertia is the simple choice, the default mode of international diplomacy, of the U.N. and the European Union. When you dig into what's holding up American resolve on Iraq, the people seem to be making more subtle distinctions than their elites.

Thus, the president's numbers aren't affected by the sob sisters of CNN's Baghdad bureau filing their heartrending reports on how thousands of Baathist apparatchiks haven't been paid since they were made redundant from Saddam's Department of Genital Mutilation and Electrode Clamping last April.

U.S. public opinion is hardheaded about this: The welfare of the Iraqi people is a bonus, but the welfare of the American people is the primary objective. That's why the United States went to war.

Steyn concludes by saying 'But it's hard to claim that your powers of diplomatic persuasion would have won over the French and Germans when you can't even win over your ''family.'' And do Americans want to hand over responsibility for Iraq to someone who won't even take responsibility for the car in his driveway?'. The difference between the Dems and the Republicans is this; Democrats want to be told that everything will be OK, that the bad men are gone and you can come out of yhe closet you were hiding in. Bush never went in the closet, instead he took a look around at the destruction around him, put on his gloves, and went to work. He never told the public that this would be easy or short. In other words, he spoke to us like the adults we are. I think the American citizenry respects that and admires Bush for it.