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What will we be looking for in 2008?
 Former Presidents Clinton, Ford, Carter and Bush arrive in Amman, Jordan, for King Hussein's funeral in 1999. YOUR E-MAIL ALERTSWASHINGTON (Creators Syndicate) -- Americans are, by actual measurement, the most optimistic people on the planet. It's deep in our genes. With the exception of those whose ancestors were here when Columbus arrived or those whose ancestors were brought here against their will in chains, every American is either an immigrant or the direct descendant of immigrants. Much has been written of the immigrant's courage required to leave family, friends and familiar surroundings, to strike out across the sea or the continent to a strange place you have never seen, to live among strange people, to speak a language in many cases you have never heard. But it is also an act of enormous optimism -- a belief that here I could breathe free and make things better if not immediately for myself, then for those who come after me. Nowhere is that characteristic American optimism more evident than in our choice of presidents. Each time a president lets us down, we go looking, confident we will find in the new candidate that which was missing in the his failed predecessor. Thus after Richard Nixon, an individual of genuine cerebral gifts but beset by demons of emotional security, we welcomed Gerry Ford, a man of obvious emotional health. How did we know? Ford toasted his own English muffins in the White House kitchen. We Americans don't need much evidence to reinforce our optimism. But then Gerry Ford had been a politician, just like Johnson and Nixon before him -- member of Congress, vice president and then president. So when Jimmy Carter came along, his outsider, anti-Washington message had special appeal: Elect me to the highest political office in the nation because I'm not a politician ... sort of the functional equivalent of going down to the Christian Science reading room to hire a neurosurgeon. Jimmy Carter was intelligent, conscientious, hard-working and patriotic, but he seemed to change his mind a lot. So next came Ronald Reagan, who hadn't changed his mind since 1964. We kept looking for and finding in the New Fellow what had been missing in the Previous Fellow. Ronald Reagan was our first two-term president since Dwight Eisenhower -- so popular that the race to succeed him was about who was the most deserving heir to the Reagan legacy. Vice President George H.W. Bush prevailed. But in 1992, for the first time in the history of polling, a plurality of American voters believed that their own children's futures would not be as bright as their own had been. America without optimism would be little more than a continental Belgium. This is meant with no disrespect to anyone from Brussels, but there are not people all over the world tonight working, praying, planning and scheming about how to get to Belgium. Bill Clinton communicated that year an exceptional empathy -- that he, unlike George H.W. Bush, understood the anxiety voters felt and that, if elected, he knew how to make things better and to repurchase that American confidence. Clinton fully delivered on that pledge. After the embarrassing personal disclosures of the second Clinton term, voters were receptive to George W. Bush's pledge to restore honor, dignity and honesty to the Oval Office. So what is missing in President George W. Bush that voters will be looking for in 2008? First, similar to the post-Vietnam War and post-Watergate electorates, voters in 2008, disillusioned by the dissembling of the national leadership, will assign highest value to honesty and candor, and turn to the candidate who treats them like grown-ups. In this week's Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll, barely one-third of voters rate Bush as "honest and straightforward," down from the 60 percent who did so in 2003. Three out of five voters in the same survey believe President Bush "deliberately misled people to make the case for war with Iraq." In 2008, voters will be looking for a candidate who is not a prisoner of his own stubbornness, but instead possesses sufficient self-confidence to own up to an unflattering fault (much as Arizona Sen. John McCain confessed to his "sacrifice of principle for personal ambition" in defending the Confederate battle flag during the 2000 South Carolina primary). Add the highest ethical standards and the independence and courage to take on powerful, well-connected constituencies, and you have a candidate who would stand in sharp contrasts to the term-limited incumbent. Remember, American voters remain incurable optimists.
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