Ready or not: dangers of the second Bush term.

THIS is the presidency of living dangerously. George W. Bush has dared more, done more, and risked more than any president since Ronald Reagan's first term. Now in this second term, when most presidents take it easier, Bush is upping the ante again. That is impressive. It is also worrisome--because this administration is failing to take many necessary precautions to protect itself against the risks for which it is volunteering.

Over the past few weeks, Washington has filled up with happy Republicans celebrating the second inaugural. They have seen parties, and musical entertainment, and fireworks. We permanent residents enjoy the fun as much as anyone. But we are also seeing dangers ahead.

The first danger is the continuing threat to this administration from within. Leaked story after leaked story buffeted the administration during the election campaign--and since Election Day, the pace has if anything picked up. Seymour Hersh and The New Yorker printed a story about covert operations inside Iran sourced to past and present CIA officials; Barton Gellman in the Washington Post whooped up a new clandestine-intelligence operation inside the Pentagon. Unlike Hersh's, Gellman's story did not expose details of any ongoing operations. But it did make clear that much of the national-security apparatus remains so implacably opposed to President Bush that it is willing to leak secrets to stop him.

The mentality of much of the CIA was splendidly summed up last month by A. B. Krongard, who served from 1998 to 2004 as the Agency's number three. "You can make the argument that we're better off" with bin Laden at large, Krongard told the London Times. Michael Scheuer, the former head of the CIA's bin Laden unit, also makes an argument that implies that the U.S. would do better to abandon the whole War on Terror. In his view, Islamic terror is an understandable response to Western provocations. The surest way to bring terror to an end, according to Scheuer, is to find out what the Islamic world wants and give it to them.

New CIA chief Porter Goss does seem to be doing an effective cull of the agency's defeatists, appeasers, and timeservers. But they are not going quietly--and they seem determined to inflict maximum damage on the way out.

That damage has been intensified by the second danger ahead: the escalating cost of the administration's inability to make an effective case for itself at home and abroad. The Bush administration excels in making big, eloquent speeches--like the second inaugural--that present its goals in broad, abstract terms. It is not so eager to offer details about the means by which it will achieve those goals.

This mismatch makes it possible for critics to accuse the administration of failing to think things through. And the same mismatch makes it difficult for defenders of the administration to rebut those accusations. We have heard the administration's strategy and we can see its tactics, but it is often difficult to figure out the connection between the two.

This difficulty will loom larger than ever in term two. As the emotions of 9/11 fade, the job of sustaining public and congressional commitment to the War on Terror will get harder and harder. Yet the administration still seems weirdly reluctant to explain or defend itself. Which means that the president continues to fall victim to his own shrewd rule: "In politics, you either define yourself--or you get defined."

Another danger ahead is the administration's often careless approach to staffing. "Personnel is policy": That was the motto of the Reagan years, and it remains as true as ever. The Bush administration can be terrifyingly casual on personnel decisions, making hiring decisions almost without regard to the ideology and values of the people upon whom it confers power. Continue that approach, and sooner or later you find yourself in the same situation as the Bush 41 administration, in which one aide famously quipped: "Our people don't have agendas; they have mortgages."

The trend toward replacing believers with time-servers is already advancing over at Condoleezza Rice's State Department, and there is reason to fear its spread over the rest of the government as well. If an elected administration is not consciously running the government to achieve its purposes, then the government is running the administration. That has not yet happened to the Bush administration, but it is coming closer all the time.

Perhaps the most serious of all the dangers, though, is the danger of poor policy coordination. I know that sounds like a topic only a poli-sci prof could care about--and so it is, until it goes wrong. Then everybody in the country begins to ask: Who is running this government?

You often hear it said, for example, that there was no plan for postwar Iraq. The truth is worse: There were two plans or possibly even three. Crucial decisions simply went unmade--and even now, crucial decisions about other potential crises continue to go unmade. It's the job of the National Security Council to force decisions and then enforce them upon agencies, but that essential job has often gone undone over the past four years. On the domestic side, too, contending views seem often to be mushed together into an unsatisfactory jumble--as happened, for example, with the president's energy plan of 2001.

This danger likewise may get worse in term two. In term one, the NSC was headed by a friend and confidant of the president. This term, that friend is moving over to State. Some hope and others fear that she will impose the president's wishes upon the department. But it could well happen that it is instead the department that ends up converting her. And in that case, the new national security adviser, who is not nearly as personally close to the president, may hesitate to resist. Relative to the CIA, State, and Defense departments, the first Bush NSC was the weakest in a generation. The second may be weaker still.

It's not too late to address these dangers. But they can't be fixed until they are acknowledged. It's always hard for a triumphantly re-elected administration to accept that all is not perfect. It may be harder for this administration than for most. But these weaknesses are real. And if they are not fixed now, they will exact their toll later.