Yesterday, Dubya loftily proclaimed:

The war we fight today is more than a military conflict; it is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century...

...For a half-century, America's primary goal in the Middle East was stability. This was understandable at the time ... it was important to support Middle Eastern governments that rejected communism.

Yet, over the decades, an undercurrent of danger was rising in the Middle East. Much of the region was mired in stagnation and despair. A generation of young people grew up with little hope to improve their lives, and many fell under the sway of radical extremism.

The terrorist movement multiplied in strength, and resentment that had simmered for years boiled over into violence across the world....

...So America has committed its influence in the world to advancing freedom and democracy as the great alternatives to repression and radicalism.

We will take the side of democratic leaders and reformers across the Middle East. We will support the voices of tolerance and moderation in the Muslim world.

Interestingly, yet predictably, just two days prior the W. Post reported on its front page that Dubya was taking the side of repression in Kazakhstan:

...the White House is making arrangements to host the leader of Kazakhstan, an autocrat who runs a nation that is anything but free ... Not only will President Nursultan Nazarbayev visit the White House, people involved say, but he also will travel to the Bush family compound in Maine...

...Nazarbayev has banned opposition parties, intimidated the press and profited from his post, according to the U.S. government. But he also sits atop massive oil reserves that have helped open doors in Washington.

Dubya said yesterday that he will continue with a series of speeches about the "long war," which is a transparent effort to try to frame the midterm elections on "you're either with us or the terrorists" grounds.

Will it work?

On one hand, this is not new rhetoric from Dubya, and his credibility is pretty shot these days. It wouldn't seem he can keep selling it so easily.

Further, people want to hear solutions on how we can quickly extricate ourselves from Iraq and finally take care of Al Qaeda, not rationalizations on why the whole mess will be so "long" from a guy who sold them a bad bill of goods in the first place.

On the other hand. Bush is laying out a long-range foreign policy vision, which Democrats haven't.

Which means Democrats don't have a framework with which to easily criticize Bush's vision and offer an alternative set of goals and strategies.

If they did, they might have been eager to call attention to Bush's coddling of the Kazakhstan dictator (among many other affronts to democracy abroad), to show Bush's fundamental insincerity in his own stated foreign policy goals.

Instead, few will even hear about the dictator's visit, and Dubya's detrimental hypocrisy.

And in the bigger scheme of things, Democrats will have no control over whether Bush's frame will be accepted or rejected by the voters.

We will have to do without one for the midterms, but it will particularly risky to do without in '08, when we'll be looking to reclaim the Oval Office.

So there's no time to lose.

Democratic candidates should be paying close attention to the series of essays that have been published by The American Prospect. Flynt Everett, Shadi Hamid and Spencer Ackerman quibble over semantics and tactics, but they're all in the right ballpark.

And I'll humbly submit that my own "Wait! Don't Move To Canada!", out in less than three weeks, tackles this subject forthrightly, succinctly and accessibly.