President Bush's 17-minute, prime-time speech Monday night, against all hope, was nothing new, a rehash of tired policy and rhetoric.

Waiting for him to speak, at the end of considerable traveling in the United States and, presumably, contact with outside-the-Washington-Beltway Americans who are not politicians, people had reason to believe that he was going to say something different. It was not entirely unrealistic to expect that he might offer new ideas and new leadership to the country to enable it to deal with the considerable problems confronting it.

Forget it. Mr. Bush stayed "on message" as usual, that message consisting of the normal line that he, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice monotonously dish out to Americans in spite of dramatically changing circumstances. He said we are safer, this in spite of the newly heated up Afghanistan war with the Taliban and the deteriorating situation in Iraq, where both U.S. forces and the Iraqi government face a hot, factional civil war.

He still insists that Saddam Hus-sein's regime in Iraq was "a clear threat" to us, even though he has admitted that his administration's claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was conspiring with al-Qaida were false. If the safety of Americans depends on what happens in the streets of Baghdad, as he claimed, the United States is in deep trouble.

What was missing was a timetable for U.S. forces' withdrawal and achieving stability in Iraq. This war has now gone on for almost as long as World War II for the United States. The number of Americans who have died in Iraq is rapidly approaching the number killed on 9/11.

Although Mr. Bush acknowledged that the building of a more hopeful Middle East holds the key to peace for America and the world, he offered no plan for achieving such a peace. He did not even mention the possibility of reviving and reinvigorating his own road map to peace in the Middle East, which he devised with the European Union, the United Nations and Russia in 2002 but has let drop.

He talked about the importance of unity for Americans. At the same time, his words about our being "not yet safe" were simply a slightly cleaned-up version of the same Republican scare rhetoric that has been put out by Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld in recent weeks seeking to persuade voters that they should let the Republicans retain control of both houses of Congress in November.

Mr. Bush's speech Monday night revealed clearly that he hasn't accepted the fact that his remaining in office until January 2009, another 28 months, provides him a unique opportunity to lead the country with vision and creativity. It is a great pity that he doesn't seem to get that.