The Chicago Tribune endorses George W. Bush for president.

Bush’s sense of a president’s duty to defend America is wider in scope than Kerry’s, more ambitious in its tactics, more prone, frankly, to yield both casualties and lasting results. This is the stark difference on which American voters should choose a president.

There is much the current president could have done differently over the last four years. There are lessons he needs to have learned. And there are reasons—apart from the global perils likely to dominate the next presidency—to recommend either of these two good candidates.

But for his resoluteness on the defining challenge of our age—a resoluteness John Kerry has not been able to demonstrate—the Chicago Tribune urges the re-election of George W. Bush as president of the United States.

UPDATE at 10/17/04 11:14:01 am:

The New York Times endorses John Kerry. What a shock.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The New York Times, one of America’s most influential newspapers, on Sunday endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry as a potentially “great chief executive.”