New York, NY —

Has President Bush been sounding different to you lately? WNYC's Brian Lehrer says since the fall of Baghdad, he's noticed a change.

Brian: Meet our new Head of State: George Bush, the Affirmative Action President.

TAPE: Making the most of economic opportunities will require broader and better education, especially among women who have faced the greatest disadvantages.

That was from the President's commencement address at the University of South Carolina last week. Now, let's be clear. The president was talking about Iraq. But in that clip, he clearly advocates taking a group that has faced the greatest disadvantages - in this case, women - and making sure they, as a group, based on their status as women, get more educational opportunities.

There's more. This is a Bush Administration Iraq official last week, organizing the first Democracy Forum in the city of Mosul.

TAPE: Azzizis over here, Kurds over here, Turkmen over there. Only Turkmen

Your ears did not deceive you. That was the Bush Administration sorting people by ethnicity for the sake of inclusion - the same Bush Administration that is opposing the University of Michigan at the Supreme Court for doing exactly that.

Now obviously, Iraq and the United States are very different. But we are similar in at least one crucial respect. Americans, like Iraqis, live in a very diverse country, where a successful civil society is similarly dependent on including people from different groups. But here, the President's rhetoric is more likely to fall back on the myth that we can have a color-blind society - rhetoric intended, frankly, to comfort his white base despite DIS-comfiting nearly everyone else.

There's another irony here that's even bigger than race. The President's whole approach to democracy in Iraq, is in fact, the opposite of his approach to democracy at home. He is carefully building a transitional Iraqi government based on the idea that all major groups need to have some real decision-making power. The term he keeps using is a representative government - not elected or even democratic government, but a representative one. And he is right to do so. It's a worthy goal.

So what about for us? This President squeaked into office in what was essentially a tie vote. And he has the slimmest of Republican majorities in both houses of Congress. But rather than embrace centrist policies that graciously acknowledge the nearly 50 percent of Americans who voted for Democrats, he takes advantage of these bare majorities to press the gamut of conservative agenda items from big tax cuts to limiting legal abortion to unilateral preventive war.

But imagine if he were building democracy in Iraq on the basis of 51 percent winner-take-all majority rule. Iraq would be a Shiite State tomorrow. Too bad on the Kurds, the Sunnis and other minorities. And, of course, too bad on the U.S., which could soon find the new Iraq to be as hostile as the old.

Which, of course, is the point, isn't it? There's an old clich in government that all politics is local. I guess that even goes for nation-building. We promote affirmative action for Iraq because it's good for the US for Iraq to have it. But maybe, Mr. President, your foreign policy would work as well at home. While Iraqis get to know you as the Affirmative Action President, maybe Americans whose groups have faced the biggest disadvantages need more opportunities, just like in Iraq. And maybe a more representative form of decision-making would improve OUR democracy too.