Conservatives have had a lot of good things to say about the president’s rhetoric of late, and I agree that there is much to be praised. But there is also, I fear, a fundamental problem. And it has been a problem for some time. The president said nothing about Iran in his speech last night. Mario, I know you say the president was conveying a “subtle” signal to Iran, but that is precisely the problem. The signal went right over American heads.

Again and again, the president rests the core of his argument on the hope of democratization. I am by no means entirely averse to the democratization argument, although I see it as only a long-term prospect, and not nearly as central to the war as the need to stop nuclear proliferation. My concern is that the nuclear proliferation issue has been dramatically downplayed in the president’s rhetorical strategy.

No doubt there are reasons for this. The failure to find WMD’s in Iraq has made it tough to highlight the dangers of nuclear proliferation. The truth, however, is that Saddam could have reconstituted his nuclear program and/or purchased nuclear material from Korea and A.Q. Kahn. There are significant diplomatic barriers to speechifying about Iran’s nukes. Honesty about the threat will raise the prospect of a military strikes, and that will scare the Europeans, the Russians, and Chinese away from cooperating with us. And politically, the Democrats will use the prospect of an attack on Iran against the president.

Having acknowledged all this, there are nonetheless huge political costs to a near total rhetorical focus on Iraq and the democracy project, at the expense of the focus on Iran and nuclear proliferation. It’s the combination of the terrorist threat with the prospect of nuclear proliferation that makes the war on terror a necessity. Without bringing home this point, the public will never understand what is truly at stake. I’m sorry to see that even John Tierney has now bought into John Mueller’s notion that the terrorist threat is overblown.

Reading Tierney’s column today (his second under the influence of Mueller), along with Richard Cohen’s Op Ed in the Washington Post, I’m struck again by the massive gulf in perceptions of the war on terror. Facing the true implications of nuclear proliferation for the United States would close that gap. But rhetorically, the president merely alludes to this core issue, while focusing nearly all his energy on democratization. That no longer works, nor is it a balanced or accurate depiction of the true nature of the task that lies before us.

It isn’t just a question of conservatives versus liberals. Many conservatives are skeptical of democracy promotion, yet far more receptive–and rightly so–to arguments about the nuclear threat that we really do face. Yet by focusing almost exclusively on democracy promotion, the president makes it tough to sustain the support of conservatives who would actually be with him, if greater focus was put on the proliferation issue.

I’ve written a couple of pieces about proliferation: “Our Fallout-Shelter Future” and “Kingdom Come.” The sort of points I raise in those two pieces are almost completely unknown to the larger public. Yet the president’s rhetorical focus remains almost entirely on democratization and Iraq. I am not saying that we should not be talking about all that. I am saying that the most critical threat–the challenge that helps make sense of, and justify, all the others, is being downplayed or left out. Senator Santorum seems to get this. (He’s had a lot to say about Iran of late.) I’m not sure the White House does.