When George W. Bush tried to gain the political offensive during the corporate scandals of 2002, he traveled to Wall Street and said he took inspiration from a fellow Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt. When Bill Clinton was worrying about the war in Bosnia, he used to take comfort from a portrait in the Cabinet Room that Philip Alexius de Laszlo painted of Theodore Roosevelt.

“Because if you look at that picture, Theodore Roosevelt, who was known as our most macho, bully, self-confident president – you look at that picture and you see here’s a human being who’s scared to death and not sure it’s going to come out all right,” Clinton said. “And he does the right thing, anyway. That’s what I saw in that picture.”

For decades American politicians have seen inspiration, and themselves, in Theodore Roosevelt and his thoughts in the early 20th century. And so on the cusp of an important election in the early 21st century, it is fair to pose the simple question: WWTD? Perhaps the best guide to what would Theodore do comes in a speech he gave after his presidency – his famous New Nationalism speech, delivered Aug. 31, 1910, in Osawatomie, Kan.

‘New Nationalism’

Now there was very little new in that speech, delivered at the site of John Brown’s 1856 anti-slavery raid, except for the fact that the Roosevelt world view suddenly acquired an alliterative name, the “new nationalism,” a phrase borrowed from Herbert Croly’s landmark book “The Promise of American Life.” But the speech, which was in part an appeal for regulatory legislation, is in fact a broad philosophical treatise – and to a reader today it stands as an eloquent modern political call to action from a man the Yale historian John Martin Blum said “could not be sure whether he was a ‘conservative radical’ or a ‘radical conservative.'”

Mr. Blum’s characterization of TR is an apt description of the two wings in American politics today. All the more reason both parties should re-examine this 95-year-old speech and adopt its precepts. Here are some excerpts, put forward to our campaigning politicians of 2006 as words to live by:

“A broken promise is bad enough in private life. It is worse in the field of politics. No man is worth his salt in public life who makes on the stump a pledge which he does not keep after election; and, if he makes such a pledge and does not keep it, hunt him out of public life.”

Now that’s a double-barreled expression of classic American political values. First, the politicians should keep their word. Second, the voters should toss them out of office if they don’t. What’s so complicated about that?

“I stand for the square deal. But when I say that I am for the square deal, I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service.”

All talk on wealth gap

This is sauce as much for the Democratic goose (the last president liked to say that he wanted to reward Americans who worked hard and played by the rules) as for the Republican gander (which likes to speak of the “opportunity society”). Lots of talk here from both sides, but the wealth gap is greater than it has ever been, having grown under Democrats and Republicans alike. We can do better.

“We must drive the special interests out of politics. That is one of our tasks today. Every special interest is entitled to justice – full, fair, and complete … but not one is entitled to a vote in Congress, to a voice on the bench or to representation in any public office.”

This stricture, which is as much fairness as philosophy, has been violated by both parties, whether by the Democrats who invited the lobbyists into the tent (and the Lincoln Bedroom) during the Clinton years or by the Republicans who promulgated the K Street Project to insist that lobby shops employ Republicans and then invited those lobbyists to write legislation. Shame on them all, and on us for tolerating it from either side.

“I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us.”

Fortunately this sort of riposte is no longer an Earth Day granola reprise but is part of the conventional rhetoric of both parties. The environmental movement truly has gone mainstream. But while polls and focus groups tell politicians this is what the public wants to hear, the politicians themselves have mastered the rhetoric but haven’t begun to change the reality. Lots of work to be done here, by the enviros who flowed into the Democratic Party in the 1970s and by the conservationists who have been part of the Republican coalition since TR and Gifford Pinchot changed the American conversation a century ago.

“We must have – I believe we have already – a genuine and permanent moral awakening, without which no wisdom or legislation or administration really means anything; and, on the other hand, we must try to secure the social and economic legislation without which any improvement due to purely moral agitation is necessarily evanescent.”

FDR meets Ronald Reagan

And so here, two decades before his fifth cousin proclaimed the activist New Deal, and seven decades before a one-time New-Dealer-turned-conservative proclaimed the ethos of small government, Theodore Roosevelt reconciled the two most important competing political outlooks of the 20th century, those of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan.

He was not making an allusion to Shakespeare: A plague o’ both your houses. He was expressing an idea from Ecclesiastes: For everything there is a season. Because what he wanted was pure Theodore Roosevelt, expressed in the New Nationalism speech in Osawatomie, and congenial equally to the Jeffersonians in today’s Democratic Party and the religious conservatives in today’s Republican Party: a genuine and permanent moral awakening. No time like now to start.