This is a moment of opportunity for President Bush. With conservatives rallying to the president’s superb choice of Samuel Alito for the Supreme Court--and with the worst of the CIA-leak investigation behind him--the way is open for the president to regain the initiative after a frustrating summer and fall.

Presidents can remain powerful and important to the very end of their term.

In his final three years in office, Ronald Reagan a) forced through a major tax reform cutting the top tax rate to 28 percent, b) faced down Mikhail Gorbachev in a dramatic series of summit meetings, c) oversaw a bounceback from the worst one-day plunge in stock prices in history, and d) signed into law the first new entitlement program since 1974 (a health-care plan that was happily repealed in 1989 before it went into effect).

President Clinton was no Ronald Reagan: Much of his final term was wasted in scandals of his own making. Yet he too presided over an otherwise positive final three years, including the Kosovo war, the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe, and the successful navigation of the 1997–98 global financial crisis.

We can be sure that dramatic events await President Bush as well. And while the faults of this president and the weaknesses in his administration have been unflatteringly highlighted in recent months, in the days ahead Americans will surely also be reminded of his strengths and merits.

But the president does not have to await events. There are things he can do right now to regain the initiative and reassert his mastery. Here are five suggestions for immediate action:

One: Get hiring. One good hire--Samuel Alito--has changed the mood in Washington from overcast to sunny. Just imagine what four or five more good hires could do, starting with the most pressing need of all: a powerful and admired secretary of the Treasury.

“Personnel is policy” is a saying from the Reagan days that George W. Bush has ignored to his cost. The president has surrounded himself with a small circle of trusted aides and advisers, and then beyond that, taken a remarkably casual attitude toward staffing the administration as a whole. While many of those hired have proven themselves solid and effective conservatives, many others seem animated by the spirit of the Bush 41 administration. (“Our people don’t have ideologies,” goes one famous line from those days. “They have mortgages.”)

This belief-blind attitude toward staffing is one reason for the weird gap that has again and again opened between the president’s bold words and his administration’s business-as-usual performance on issues ranging from homeland security to health-care reform. While the Bush personnel office cares intensely that a job candidate worked to help elect or reelect George W. Bush, they do not seem to care much whether the job candidate actually agrees with the policies George W. Bush got elected and reelected to execute.

Right now it seems that half of official Washington is urging the president to cashier Karl Rove. This is crazy: Rove is performing. The aides the president should be replacing are those who are not performing. And maybe he should start with the aides who are hiring the aides.

Two: Rediscover moral clarity. The president of Iran has just threatened to annihilate Israel as soon as he completes his nukes program. Alarming, no? Back in 2002, President Bush pledged to prevent the world’s most dangerous regimes from acquiring the world’s deadliest weapons. That commitment seems now to have fallen by the wayside.

What is the Bush administration’s North Korea policy? What is its Iran policy? Nobody seems to know. A conveniently timed leak tells us that Iran may still be years away from completing a bomb--so don’t worry. A meaningless exchange of notes with North Korea is promoted as a dramatic diplomatic breakthrough.

Yes, the difficulties in Iraq have limited to some extent the administration’s freedom of action. But Iraq alone does not seem to explain the policy breakdown. It is as if the administration has lost sight of its original pledges and its own criteria for success. But if this administration leaves office with Iran and North Korea still trundling toward nuclear-power status, the administration will have failed--no matter how many negotiating rounds it worked through. It’s time to recollect what it was that the Bush administration went to Washington to do.

Three: Re-energize. Rising gasoline prices translate into falling poll numbers. Add surging bills for home heating this winter, and . . . well, 2006 starts looking like a very tough year for incumbents. The Bush administration devised and Congress has enacted energy reforms, some of them genuinely helpful, others more symbolic. The plan was intended to increase domestic energy production, especially oil and gas production. The plan’s authors hoped that if more of America’s energy originated in this country--or at least from within this hemisphere--the United States would be less vulnerable to supply shocks.

This plan, however, offered scant help to energy consumers. The price of oil and gas is set by international markets. Consumers care little whether their $3-a-gallon gasoline comes from Nigeria or Texas. They want cheap energy, not domestic energy. And over the past five years, energy has become steadily more costly, with no relief in sight.

In 2001 and 2002, the president courageously championed nuclear power as the long-term solution to the energy problem. Nuclear power is environmentally more benign than coal-fired electricity, and could be abundant and cheap enough someday to help hydrogen cars or other alternative motor fuels become a reality. Yet in half a decade, the U.S. has made little progress toward building new nuclear plants. Promoting nuclear power offers the president a way to identify himself with both national-security and consumer concerns, in ways that honor his own personal convictions. Time to go back to work on this subject.

Four: Look over the horizon. Starting from a weak political position in 2001, President Bush was often forced in his first term to deviate from his long-term principles for short-term survival: steel tariffs, the repeal of the farm reforms of the 1990s, signing McCain-Feingold, prescription drugs--the list goes on. Now that he is a reelected president, the only term he need care about is the long term. Yet the bill for those short-term concessions is now beginning to arrive. The prescription-drug plan is scheduled to go into effect next year. The costs will prove horrific. At the same time, the administration should brace itself against the disappointment and anger of seniors who are about to discover that it delivers less than many of them had hoped or expected.

As far as I can tell, almost nobody in the administration is preparing now to cope with this problem--which means that when it arrives it will jolt the administration as abruptly and unexpectedly as this summer’s hurricanes.

To keep control of the agenda, the administration and Congress need to act now to anticipate trouble next year--including preparing proposals to reform the prescription-drug plan so as to control its costs. President Reagan’s health entitlement was abolished almost as soon as it went into effect. It is not impossible that something like that could happen with George W. Bush’s drug benefit. If it did, a multi-trillion-dollar unfunded liability would suddenly vanish from the account books of the United States. That has to be bullish, right? And if the stock market is languishing next year, bullish news will surely be welcomed by many congressional voters.

Five: Return to Iraq. The administration sometimes seems to give the impression that it hopes that if it does not talk about Iraq, the voters won’t think about Iraq. But Iraq is always there, in the background, troubling American minds, influencing voters’ perceptions. The administration’s curious unwillingness to talk in specific and convincing ways about the good news from Iraq creates political opportunities for its opponents to present the war as unremittingly catastrophic.

The Iraq war is the Bush administration. If Americans come to believe that the war was a costly and unnecessary mistake, that will be their verdict on George W. Bush too. The war won’t speak for itself. The president has to defend, champion, and explain the war--or else be destroyed by it.

He has a story to tell. The troops in Iraq are motivated and committed. They believe in the mission. More and more Iraqis are now joining the fight, upward of 80 battalions of troops in the top three grades of readiness. As Michael Ledeen has argued on National Review Online, intercepted communications from Ayman al-Zawahiri to Musab al-Zarqawi paint a picture of an insurgency in extreme distress. And the trial of Saddam Hussein reminds Iraq, the Middle East, and the world of the nature of the enemy in this conflict.

Perhaps the president should consider a return visit to Iraq. Failing that, the administration has to find ways to highlight the positive news that Central Command collects and fires into the ether every day. (You can read it yourself at www.centcom.mil.)

The great enduring mystery about the Bush administration has been the strange disparity between the boldness of the president’s strategies and the extreme caution of his tactics; between the strength of his goals and the weakness of his methods; between the stirring eloquence of his major statements and the feeble uncertainty of the administration’s day-to-day communications. It’s the magnificent asset side of the ledger that sustains the administration’s friends; it’s the troubling debits that embolden its enemies. If this presidency is to live up to the nation’s best hopes, it must find some way--and fast--to balance its political bookkeeping.

David Frum is a resident fellow at AEI.