This election isn't just about two men. It's a referendum on a very specific, very modern political strategy: the strategy of presidential infallibility.

The Bush-Cheney campaign believes that the way for the president to win this election is to admit no mistakes of any kind. Thus, in the campaign's telling, there were no major errors of judgment or fact in the past four years.

When presented with evidence to the contrary, deny. Don't give an inch. We are the champions, my friend—in Iraq, on the economy, and for all things under the sun.

As strategies go, infallibility is very simple. In fact, simplicity is the whole point. When you're blessed with an opponent whose positions require elaborate chronologies and Venn diagrams to be understood, clarity has obvious benefits. The thinking here is that swing voters, having spent months stumbling around John Kerry's house of sand and fog, will appreciate the firm beauty of a stone wall.

But what's remarkable about the Bush campaign's wall of infallibility is that it's full of chinks, places where the light shines straight through and the plotting going on behind it can be seen. Unlike papal infallibility, this one tacitly assumes that we see the façade for what it is and recognize its clever craftsmanship.

And we do. Time magazine reported this week that as the president went into debate No. 2, the campaign settled on the dug-in approach: "There would be no admission of error, despite a weeklong discussion within his campaign about whether to show any contrition about anything."

Contrition is on the table strictly as a tactical possibility. Honesty is not a moral imperative, but a policy option. Even when the question is war and people are dying every day. There were mistakes only if we decide it helps us to have been mistaken. It doesn't, so there weren't any.

The magazine went on to quote "an outside adviser to the Bush team" who said: "There's no turning back now.... It's too late for the president to admit mistakes or take a nuanced position on Iraq. He just has to keep arguing he was right and Kerry's a flip-flopper who can't be trusted to keep America safe."

If you go back to the transcript of that debate and read carefully, you'll find embedded there a subtle running dialogue about the wisdom of ever admitting error. "I don't see how the Iraqis are going to have confidence in the American president if all they hear is that it was a mistake to be there in the first place," Bush said at one point, blithely showing his hand.

Toward the end, a woman asked him, "President Bush, during the last four years, you have made thousands of decisions that have affected millions of lives. Please give three instances in which you came to realize you had made a wrong decision, and what you did to correct it."

Bush's answer was one of the most telling moments in the campaign. He first conceded that there were "little" decisions, "like appointments to boards you never heard of," where he might have been wrong, and "tactical" decisions related to the war that historians (but apparently not he) may one day question. "But on the big questions about whether or not we should have gone into Afghanistan, the big question about whether we should have removed somebody in Iraq, I'll stand by those decisions because I think they're right. That's really what you're—when they ask about the mistakes, that's what they're talking about. They're trying to say, 'Did you make a mistake going into Iraq?' And the answer is, absolutely not. It was the right decision."

The woman hadn't even hinted that one of the mistakes she had in mind was the war. Bush himself raised that question, then answered it. It was as if his conscience rushed on stage naked and had to be shooed off.

Infallibility has a long history, of course. Pre-Enlightenment monarchs were right by definition, and so had no qualms about saying so. In the age of democracy, refusal to admit error is a dicier proposition. But in recent years, it's had a renaissance as a highly effective political tool, thanks to Bill and Hillary Clinton.

In the Clinton years, infallibility wasn't just a crisis-management tool; it was a way of de-legitimizing criticism. Not only is an infallible president incapable of serious error, but anyone who questions his performance is by definition clueless and quite likely corrupt. The president does no wrong; all fault lies with his critics.

Sound familiar? Bush's absolute certainty that he's in the right is straight out of the Clinton playbook. It's a very highly evolved form of political gamesmanship, a new brand of moral relativism—it's right if I say so—masquerading as morality.

Next to this, Kerry's mushiness looks positively old-school. The doctrine of infallibility frowns on such public dithering. Errors of judgment are discussed behind closed doors and should never see the light of day. Only losers change their story.