In a commencement address delivered Monday at his alma mater, Yale University, President Bush answered a hostile crowd of protesting professors and jeering students with lots of good-natured jabs at himself. Although the “Animal House to the White House” routine wore a bit thin, the self-deprecation approach was a deft response to a ticklish situation.

In his commencement address a day earlier at Notre Dame, the president displayed a trait less admirable. His call for a new, a third, War on Poverty (the first was LBJ’s Great Society, the second the Welfare Reform act of 1996) was no doubt sincere, but his continued failure to answer concerns about his plan to encourage government funding of social services offered by churches suggests an inability to flesh out the details of a broad policy. Or, to put it another way, to distinguish between campaigning and governing.

The concerns are legitimate and widespread; spread, in fact, across the political spectrum, with left-leaning civil libertarians and I – coming as a most unpleasant surprise to the president – the religious right united in worry about the plan’s real potential to weaken the wall that separates church and state. Yet, three months after his conservative allies raised strong objections to the strings that might come attached to the money, about the fringe or non-Christian groups that might qualify for funds and about the corruption or bureaucratic bloat the program could bring to church organizations, Mr. Bush continues to portray the opposition as essentially liberal.

More disturbing is his refusal to acknowledge the concerns that are coming from the middle. According to a nationwide survey conducted by the esteemed Pew Research Center and published more than a month ago, the only thing the vast majority of Americans like about this proposal is the concept – the details, the possibility that government money would go to religious charlatans or used to proselytize was widely panned.

The president is correct in noting that Medicaid and Medicare money currently goes to religious hospitals, that child-care vouchers for low-income families are redeemed every day at houses of worship and that government loans send countless students to religious colleges. He errs, however, in asserting that critics of his plan want to end those things and in failing to recognize that health care, childcare and higher education are discrete services – unlike, for instance, drug and alcohol counseling – that a faith-based organization easily can separate from its religious mission.

And he errs in mistaking what, at best, can only be a modest expansion of federal funding of church-based social services for a full-scale war on poverty. No church, even with a government grant to help, can address the inability of millions of American families to afford health insurance and prescription medications, to put balanced meals on the table daily or get the job skills to improve their lives.

Given that the current poverty rate in the United States, after a decade of economic boom, is higher than it was in the early 1970s and higher today than in most other developed countries, and that the financial resources that could go to a meaningful expansion of antipoverty programs are instead going to a tax cut, Mr. Bush’s War on Poverty III starts life as an underfunded skirmish with slim hope of victory.