Or he used the folksier incarnation: "When I say something, I mean it."
Or the bad-punch-line version: "Sometimes, I'm a little too blunt. I get that from my mother. Sometimes, I mangle the English language. I get that from my dad. But all the times, you know where I stand, what I believe, and where I'm going to lead this country."
At which point Charlene Morgano in the audience yelled back, "That's why I love you!" Nonetheless, Bush went back to the standard stump speech one event later.
Bush is famous for his seemingly preternatural confidence, unless you compare him to the real king of confidence. In 1976 Ronald Reagan was flying to New Hampshire before the primary. Pollster Dick Wirthlin told him that he would likely lose. Looking out of the airplane window, he saw the lights of Manchester, just visible beneath the clouds. Reagan replied, "Well Dick, I sure hope someone down there is lighting a candle for me," recalled Wirthlin.
"He just didn't agonize," said Wirthlin. "He really believed that if he wasn't elected president, then it just wasn't meant to happen."
Bush, the Reagan advisers say, doesn't have that distinctive calm. It begins to show in his body language, says one Reagan adviser who didn't want to be identified because he sometimes counsels Bush. "He has a wide-eyed look, his mouth becomes fairly tight and the edges turn down."
Another overconfident, messianic leader -- Howard Dean -- cracked spectacularly, floridly, with his Iowa scream. But those who were close to him saw signs that reality was dawning. Even before Iowa, Dean started asking too many detailed questions during conference calls -- Who was manning the phone banks? What time were people arriving? -- his advisers recall.
In Iowa he watched the results in a bus with a handful of close advisers. " 'It looks like we lost big,' " is all he said, "plain and normal sounding," recalls one of the people on the bus. Then Dean huddled in the back with campaign manager Joe Trippi. In Bush country you see the first signs of people preparing, spiritually, for an alternate reality. At a rally in Columbus, Ohio, Friday, Nana Young agreed with the Rev. Rod Parsley, from the Center for Moral Clarity. "When we pull the curtain on the voting booth, let us remember that you, Almighty, are still watching," he'd prayed before the event.
Young's church, Grove City Nazarene, will hold a prayer vigil Monday night to ask that the "Lord to put the right man in the White House."
"Lord," they will say, "Guide people when they go into that voting booth. Guide their hand to vote by the Bible."
But Young is not blinkered; she reads the newspapers, knows how hair-thin a margin Bush has in Ohio. Only this week she began to consider the impossible, that Bush could be right and still lose -- and put that together with her conviction that God knows what He's doing.
"If that happens, the Lord must want Kerry to be in there," she says. "If that happens, it must be the Lord is telling us we're living in the Last Days, and we'd better prepare."
