President Bush let the ball roll under his glove on Thursday when he hinted that he has little enthusiasm for the recommendations of the commission co-chaired by former secretary of state James Baker and the former House International Relations Committee chairman Lee Hamilton.

Whatever might be questioned in any particular recommendation of the report, the bipartisan spirit and consensus-building purpose of the Iraq Study Group deserve grateful praise from the president, not a defensive rejection.

If Bush sensed an implicit rebuke to his own statecraft in the Baker-Hamilton call for a return to the traditional practice of negotiating with adversaries, he was right. This matter should not be reduced to some displaced Oedipal struggle Bush may be waging with his father. Whatever the psychological sources, they pale in importance beside the world-changing fact that Bush, by refusing to negotiate with regimes he defines as evil, has broken radically with all his predecessors.

The results include avoidable nuclear proliferation in Asia and the looming specter of all-out sectarian warfare in Iraq. With its revival of the tradition of seeking consensus on foreign policy, the ISG report offers Bush a chance he should not miss — a chance to become a uniter of the country, not a denier of reality.