I have won what I call political capital and now I intend to
spend it.
—George W. Bush,
Driving north from Tampa on Florida's Route 75 on November 1, as the battle
over who would hold political power in America was reaching a climax but the
struggle over what that battle meant had yet to begin, I put down the top of my
rented green convertible, turned the talk radio voices up to blaring, and
commenced reading the roadside. Beside me billboards flew past, one hard upon
another, as if some errant giant had cut a great deck
of cards and fanned them out along each shoulder. Hour by hour, as the booming
salesman's voice of proud Floridian Rush Limbaugh rumbled from the radio,
warning gravely of the dangers of "voting for bin Laden"
("Haven't you noticed that bin Laden is using Democratic talking
points?"), and other ominous voices reminded listeners of the
"hundreds of votes" Senator Kerry cast "against our national
defense" ("In a time of terror, when our enemies are gathering...can
we afford to take that risk?"), I watched rush by, interspersed with
the blaring offers of "Florida Citrus! One Bag $1!" and "Need
Help With Sinkholes?," a series of perhaps fifty
garish signs announcing an approaching "Adult Toy Café!" and
"Adult Toy Extravaganza!" and then "We Bare All!" and
finally, the capper, "All Nude—Good Food— Truckers Welcome!"
It wasn't long before this billboard parade had acquired its stark spiritual
counterpoint—"Jesus Is Still the Answer!"—and by the time I reached
the promised "extravaganza"—a sad and windowless two-room shack just
off the highway, smaller than most of the signs advertising it—I found, standing
just down the road from the pathetic little house of sin, a resplendent white
church more than twice its size. In the world of American hucksterism, the sin
may be the draw but the payoff's always in redemption.
This was perhaps thirty-six hours before an army of self-interested
commentators, self-appointed spiritual leaders, and television pundits hot for
a simple storyline had seized on the answers to a clumsily posed exit poll
question—more than one respondent in five, offered seven choices, had selected
"moral values" as their "most important issue"—and used
those answers to transform the results of the 2004 election into a rousing
statement of Americans' disgust with abortion, promiscuity, R-rated movies, gay
marriage, late-night television, and other "Hollywood-type" moral
laxity. Some, like the Reverend Bob Jones III, president of
In your re-election, God has graciously granted
Undoubtedly, you will have opportunity to appoint many
conservative judges and exercise forceful leadership with the Congress in
passing legislation that is defined by biblical norm regarding the family,
sexuality, sanctity of life, religious freedom, freedom of speech, and limited
government. You have four years—a brief time only—to leave an imprint for
righteousness upon this nation that brings with it the blessings of Almighty
God....
If you have weaklings around you who do not share your
biblical values, shed yourself of them.
And yet the voters of Union County, Florida's smallest, whom I found
crowding the election supervisor's office in tiny Lake Butler, seemed unaware
that they had been impelled to vote by a newfound quest for redemption. In
Back in the car, I turned on the radio to find the
A suspicious package that seemed to be vibrating forced the
closing of the State Board of Elections today. The parcel, it turned out, was
an ordinary package that happened to have been placed next to an air conditioner,
the breeze from which accounted for the apparent vibrating action....
This embarrassing incident, which in other times might have been treated as
a humorous item about the haplessness of government officials, was reported in
dead seriousness: a dark dispatch from the front lines. As I left
Osama bin Laden cannot launch an
attack on the
Returning to the days of appeasement, trying to meet a
"global test" of world opinion, ignoring threats from hostile nations
and groups is a deadly mistake we simply can't afford to make.... The Democrat
Party in this country is eager to point to the things bin Laden said and
suggest that he is right—a man who happily murdered three thousand Americans
and is eager to do so over and over and over again! You say, "Rush, I
haven't heard the Democrats say that." Oh, you can find it on their Web
sites. You can find people who are going to vote for John Kerry who have said
this. You can find people on various Democrat Web sites who are excited bin
Laden said what he said. They're hoping for an Osama smackdown of Bush, if I may quote one of the things I saw.
Interspersed with Limbaugh's extraordinarily fluid and persuasively
deceptive tirade—heard, according to his home station in Sacramento, by
"nearly 20 million people over 600 stations"—came the political
advertisements, one after another, which turned skillfully around a
concentrated version of the same plotline: First, the threat America faces
today is as great as any in the country's history. Second, that threat makes
this election "the most important in history," because if Americans
make "the wrong choice" they could make themselves and their families
more vulnerable. Third, therefore, Americans must vote, and must make "the
right choice." Fear is joined skillfully to risk: a risk that is personal
and looming, and—most important—that could very well increase if the election
goes the wrong way.
The script of the famous "Wolves" television ad, with its simple
image of a pack of ravenous, circling carnivores readying for the attack,
embodied this plotline in perhaps its purest form:
In an increasingly dangerous world....
Even after the first terrorist attack on America...John Kerry and the liberals
in Congress voted to slash America's intelligence operations. By six billion dollars.... Cuts so deep they would have
weakened America's defenses. And weakness attracts those who are waiting to do
America harm.
A vote for Bush is a vote to stave off that weakness. More important, a
failure to vote could make way for that "weakening of America's defenses."
As I headed to Jacksonville, grave voices from the radio warned again and again
of what was at stake:
John Kerry. The most liberal man in the
Senate. The most liberal person to ever run for
president. He voted to cut our military.... To
severely cut our intelligence agencies.... He voted for higher taxes 350
times.... And now he wants to be our President.... We live in a dangerous world
that requires strong and steady leadership. John Kerry is a risky choice for
America...a risk we cannot take.
This rhetoric of risk carries forward a narrative that
Republicans began shaping soon after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and
that came boldly to the fore as a political strategy the following May, when
Vice President Cheney declared that the statements of several Democratic
senators, who had rather timidly questioned some of the decisions made in
conducting the war in Afghanistan, were "unworthy of national leaders in a
time of war." Though this bold shot across the bow essentially put an end
to any overt Democratic criticism of the administration on the conduct of the
war on terror, Republicans clearly realized that when it came to terrorism and
national security, as Karl Rove observed during a speech to the Republican
National Committee in January 2002, they could "go to the country on this
issue, because [Americans] trust the Republican Party to do a better job of
protecting and strengthening America's military might and thereby protecting
America."
That autumn Republicans triumphed in the midterm elections,
largely because they effectively exploited Americans' apparent willingness to
believe that the Republicans could better protect the country. This
strategy was displayed most dramatically in Saxby Chambliss's
victory over the incumbent Max Cleland in the Senate race in Georgia, in which
the challenger portrayed Cleland, a highly decorated veteran who had lost three
limbs in Vietnam, as an ally of bin Laden. Though the claims were obviously
trumped up—they rested on the fact that Cleland had not instantly voted for the
creation of the Department of Homeland Security—the images of Cleland's and bin
Laden's faces side by side in effect doomed the
incumbent.
The attacks of September 11 restored to Republicans their traditional
political advantage in matters of "national security" and
"national defense" —an advantage the party had lost with the end of
the cold war—and Republicans capitalized on that advantage, not only by running
President Bush as "a war president," as he repeatedly identified
himself, but by presenting a vote for John Kerry—whom the Republicans succeeded
in defining (with a good deal of help from the Swift Boat Veterans, and from
Kerry himself) as indecisive, opportunistic, and untrustworthy—as a vote that
was inherently, dangerously risky. The emphasis placed on Bush's much-promoted
personal strengths—decisiveness, determination, reliability,
transparency—served to base his candidacy at once on "moral values"
and on "national security," in effect making possession of the first
essential to protect the second. Bush's decisiveness was put forward as the
flip side of Kerry's dangerous vacillation, the answer to the threat of
weakness Kerry was alleged to pose. This equation was dramatized, perfected, and
repeated, with much discipline and persistence, in thousands of advertisements,
speeches, and "talking heads" discussion programs on conservative
networks, especially Fox. (In Lake Butler, Miss Babs's
husband, she told me, "watches only Fox News. He believes all the other
channels are propaganda.") Despite all the talk about "moral
values," the 2004 election turned on a fulcrum of fear.
|
MARGINS OF VICTORY |
|||
|
|
President |
Popular Vote |
Electoral Vote |
|
1904 |
Theodore Roosevelt |
17% |
196 |
|
1956 |
Dwight D. Eisenhower |
16% |
384 |
|
1972 |
Richard M. Nixon |
23% |
503 |
|
1984 |
Ronald Reagan |
18% |
512 |
|
2004 |
George Bush |
2% |
34 |
Famously, as I have mentioned, more than one in five Americans—22
percent—who spoke to pollsters as they left the voting places said, when
presented with seven choices, that their "most important issue" had
been "moral values," and of these four out of five cast their votes
for George Bush. On the other hand, 19 percent selected "terrorism"
and another 15 percent chose "Iraq," meaning that more than one in
three voters said the war—the Iraq war or the "war on terror"—was
their most important issue. In fact, the most striking single result of the
exit polls was Bush's much stronger appeal to women—many of them, apparently,
the much-discussed "security moms," who were thought to be especially
concerned about protecting their families. All of these numbers and conclusions,
needless to say, bear further scrutiny.
Using an exit poll to draw precise conclusions from a national election is
like using a very blurry magnifying glass to analyze the brushstrokes in a huge
and complicated pointillist painting. Our tools for judging what elections
"mean" are quite crude, depending as they do on the willingness of
voters to speak to pollsters, on their ability to speak honestly about the
choices they made, and on their particular talents for understanding and expressing
their own motives. As we saw this year—when faulty exit polls that suggested an
overwhelming Kerry victory significantly distorted election-day press
coverage—they can often produce downright wrong conclusions. Despite the
"scientific" feel that numbers lend to any analysis, there is more
art to it than science and, despite the impression that election and analysis
are starkly separate, much analysis, as the Reverend Jones's letter to
President Bush suggests, simply carries forward beyond the election a self-interested
political narrative that preceded it.
If one stands back a bit and lets the drifting smoke of the
pundits and the preachers and the exit poll analysts begin to clear, three
interesting facts about the 2004 election stand out. The first is that the election was very close —historically close, in fact. The
table on this page shows the margins of victory, in percentage of the popular
vote and in electoral votes, of sitting Republican presidents who have won
reelection during the last hundred years.
As these numbers show, incumbency is a huge advantage; nonetheless, Bush's
reelection was a squeaker, the closest for a Republican in more than a century.[2]
Four years after the historically close election of 2000, and after a
hard-fought eight-month campaign in which the candidates, the parties, and
so-called "independent" groups spent more than a billion dollars to
woo voters, the electoral map hardly changed. Only three small states switched
sides: the Democrats picked up
Had fewer than 60,000 Ohio voters decided to cast their ballots for the
Democrat rather than the Republican (and according to the exit polls one voter
in twenty decided whom to vote for on election day), John Kerry would have won
Ohio's twenty electoral votes and with them the presidency—and would have
entered the White House in January 2005, as George W. Bush had done in January
2001, having won the votes of fewer Americans than the man he defeated. About
2,991,437 fewer, which, as I write, is George W. Bush's
margin of victory, out of 122,124,783 votes cast for president.
Which leads to the second interesting fact about the 2004 election: a great
many more people turned out to vote, nearly seventeen million more, than
turned out four years ago. Nearly 60 percent of those
Americans eligible cast ballots in 2004, an increase in turnout of almost 6
percent.[4] In the so-called
battleground states, where vast sums were spent on advertising and one could
not escape the barrage of political messages blaring from television and radio
and pouring out of the telephone and the mailbox, the increase in turnout was
even greater. A million and a half more Floridians cast ballots than had four
years before: in 2000—itself an intensely fought election in which turnout
substantially increased—fewer than 56 percent of eligible Floridians voted; in
2004 more than 65 percent did.
This leads, finally, to the third interesting fact about the election, which
is that in the days leading up to it many of the "indicators" which
political professionals have traditionally taken to suggest whether or not an
incumbent will win were running distinctly against President Bush. Most
notably, more Americans (55 percent) said they thought the country was
"headed in the wrong direction" than those who said it was headed in
the right one, and fewer than half of Americans polled (49 percent) said that
they approved of the President's performance in office. More disapproved than
approved of the President's handling of foreign policy (49 percent to 45
percent) and of the economy (51 percent to 43 percent). Finally more Americans
disapproved than approved of the President's handling of
The President went into the election, then, with Americans
mildly pessimistic about the direction of the country and broadly disapproving
of his performance and his policies. Most polls showed the race "too close
to call," and many of the major indicators, "historically"
speaking, suggested the incumbent would lose. Small wonder that so many
experts, including apparently the President's own political team, were willing
to believe the election-day exit polls that into the early evening showed their
man losing by a considerable margin. (The widely circulated numbers from the
respected polling firm Zogby International, for
example, showed Mr. Kerry winning 311 electoral votes). The fact was that
though President Bush was personally popular, many of his major policies were
not. The problem for the Bush campaign was how to turn attention away from
policies voters didn't like —particularly the President's decisions on Iraq and
his conduct of the war there—toward policies they approved of—particularly his
conduct of "the war on terror" (into which Iraq would be "folded")—and
toward his personal qualities.
If your babies were left all alone in the dead of night, who
would you rather have setting there on the porch—John Kerry and his snowboard
or George W. with his shotgun?
—Sean Michaels, professional wrestler, warming up the crowd,
Tinker Field,
On a beautiful October evening three days before the election, Orlando's
Tinker Field had become an enormous bowl filled with 17,000 screaming, chanting
Bush partisans floating in a sea of red, white, and blue. On the stadium wall
hung a great fifty-foot high sign proclaiming that George W. Bush was
"MOVING AMERICA FORWARD!" Inside, flanking the stage in letters that
dwarfed it, and echoed by smaller signs bobbing up and down everywhere in the
crowd, was the terse slogan "
"Well..., I'm just so proud of the way he handled 9/11—I mean, that
was...amazing!" Dot Richardson-Pinto told me as we sat together
near the podium. When I'd asked why she supported the President, she had had to
search a moment for an answer, and not entirely because she couldn't understand
how it could be that anyone wouldn't. She'd had to think for a moment, I came
to realize, because her ardor had so much more to do with who he was than with
what he did. And who he was could be summarized by those four giant
words looming over the stage.
"It doesn't matter if the man can talk," Ms. Richardson-Pinto told
me. "Sometimes, when someone's real articulate you can't trust what he
says, you know?" As the security helicopters circled overhead, and the
crowd launched into yet one more chant of "Kerry is scary!" I
was struck again by how precisely the campaign had managed to define Bush's
strengths in perfect contradistinction to what they had defined as Kerry's
weaknesses, and then to devote all its resources to emphasizing both. Every
repetition of what Bush was—and the repetitions were
unending, and intricately varied —was crafted to be a perfect reminder
of what his opponent was not. Practically every word emitted by the campaign,
whether through the thousands and thousands of television and radio
commercials, or the words of the campaign spokesmen, or the speeches of the
candidate himself, moved in gorgeously disciplined lockstep to drive home to
voters not only who George W. Bush was but who his opponent was not. As Bush
became more and more Bush ("STRENGTH! LEADERSHIP! CHARACTER!
INTEGRITY!"), Kerry, little-known, chilly, distant, was turned into the
anti-Bush, a weak, shallow, flipflopping, shillyshallyer whose every word was an attempt to deceive
Americans about who he really was.
In blue shirt and black slacks the President strode into the stadium,
flanked by his wife and brother Jeb, and raised his
hands to the rock-star reception. When the thunderous chants
—"Viva Bush! Viva Bush!"—had finally dropped off
to a scattering of shouts, he launched into a speech whose terms I knew well
but whose effectiveness, with Ms. Richardson-Pinto sitting beside me, I only
now understood. George W. Bush seemed to be speaking directly to her, to be
bringing her into his family:
Sometimes I'm a little too blunt— I get that from my mother.
[Huge cheers] Sometimes I mangle the English language—I get that from my
dad. [Laughter and cheers]
But you always know where I stand. You can't say that for my
opponent....
The fact is that all progress on other issues depends
on the safety of our citizens. The most solemn duty of the American president
is to protect the American people. [Loud cheers.
Chants of "Four More Years! Four More Years! Four More Years!"]
The president must make tough decisions and stand behind
them. Especially in time of war mixed signals only confuse our friends and
embolden our enemies.
If
In a few blunt lines Bush had subsumed everything else beneath
the preeminent shining banner of the war on terror, and subsumed that war
beneath his own reputation for forthrightness, decisiveness, and strength. And
he had identified uncertainty, hesitation, vacillation—even the sort of
nit-picking that would seek to separate the war in Iraq from the war on terror
—as not simply mistaken or foolish but dangerous.
"Relentless"..."Steadfast"..."Determined": these
words came fast and strong, again and again. And then the climactic line: "We
will fight the terrorists across the globe so we do not have to fight them here
at home!" It drew a huge response and after the applause and chanting
had finally died down he followed up with his most important words about the
current shooting war:
I will use every asset at our disposal to protect the
American people and one of the best assets we have is freedom! Freedom
is powerful!
Freedom is not
On good days and bad days, whether the polls are up or the
polls are down, I am determined to protect the American people!
The Iraq war was not only irrevocably part of the war on terror—who could
think, gazing at the car bombs and beheadings every night on television, that
they were any different?—it had become a leading part of the ideological
response to the threat of terror: a first step in the expansion of the holy
cause of freedom. As Reagan had dared to go beyond staunch anticommunism and
imagine a world after communism's collapse, so Bush looked beyond the present
chaotic world of terror to see a blessed land of freedom.6 ("In
this election, my opponent has spent a lot of time talking about a day that is
gone. I'm talking about the day that is coming.") It was a striking
vision, clear and absolutely simple to understand. And it linked, firmly and directly,
the so-called "moral values" of justice, fairness, and the Almighty
to the cause of national security, and specifically to the war on terror that
the Bush people kept relentlessly at the campaign's heart. "Terror,"
"
Of course whatever its virtues as a campaign theme, the picture the
President offered was not especially "fact-dependent." Many
well-known facts— on which Kerry, in his campaign, had laid such stress—were
either irrelevant to it (the missing weapons of mass destruction, which went
unmentioned) or directly contradicted by it (the failure to demonstrate
connections between
Two weeks before the election, after the Senate Intelligence
Committee report on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and the Duelfer Report, and after intensive news coverage of the
administration's failure to find such weapons in Iraq, nearly three Bush
supporters in four told pollsters they believed Iraq had either had weapons of
mass destruction (47 percent) or had had a "major program" to develop
them (26 percent). Nearly three in five said they believed that the widely
publicized Duelfer Report, which directly
contradicted this, had in fact confirmed it. Three in four believed that
Many of the Bush supporters I spoke to were educated, well-informed people.
They watched the news and took pleasure in debating politics. And yet they
clung to views about important matters of fact that were demonstrably wrong.
Steven Kull, the public opinion expert at the
University of Maryland who authored the study from which these numbers are
drawn, acknowledges that although one reason they "cling so tightly to
beliefs that have been so visibly refuted...is that they continue to hear the
Bush administration confirming these beliefs," the prevalence, and
persistence, of these misperceptions is "probably not due to a simple
failure to pay attention to the news." Rather, Kull
writes, "Bush supporters cling to these beliefs because they are necessary
for their support for the decision to go to war with
Asked whether the
This analysis suggests the difficulties Kerry faced in pressing home his
highly "fact-dependent" argument that the
Those running the Bush campaign clearly counted on the talent and influence
of impressive propagandists like Limbaugh, and the help they received from an
often acquiescent mainstream press. More, they counted on the President's
reputation for forthrightness, together with the political folk wisdom that
many people, particularly "during wartime," believe "the man,
not the fact." When Bush, in full rhetorical flower in Tinker Field,
declared to his delirious audience that "Americans need a president who doesn't think terrorism is 'a nuisance,'"
my neighbor Ms. Richardson-Pinto nudged me with her elbow and shouted over the
laughter and cheers, "Do you believe Kerry said that?"
Actually, I shouted into her ear, Kerry hadn't said that, and then I
paraphrased for her the actual quotation:
We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists
are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance. As a former law
enforcement person, I know we're never going to end prostitution... [and] illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it,
organized crime, to a level where...it's something that you continue to fight,
but it's not threatening the fabric of your life.[8]
Hardly exceptional; indeed, Bush himself had only weeks before said
something very similar. Ms. Richardson-Pinto, a well-educated, worldly woman —a
doctor, and a two-time Olympic gold medalist in women's softball— listened to
me intently, nodded politely, began to form a question, and then, thinking
better of it, looked at me for a moment longer before turning back to the
President. She'd had a choice what—or rather whom—to believe; and she'd made
it.
Saddam would never have disarmed.
—George W. Bush, first presidential debate,
Seven o'clock on the evening of Election Day and the office of the election
supervisor in downtown Jacksonville was mobbed, encircled by a raggedy line of
hundreds and hundreds of late voters. In the street in front an enormous crowd
of Democrats chanted, cheered, and sang, filling every inch of space and
spilling out into the streets. Car after car, horns blaring, made its way
carefully through the crowd, the drivers leaning out to administer high fives
and to cheer, and cheer again. When word of the early exit-poll numbers seeming
to confirm an overwhelming Kerry victory swept through the crowd, hundreds
broke into song, to the tune of the old civil rights classic, "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me
Around":
Ain't gonna let nobody steal my vote
Steal my vote, steal my vote
Ain't gonna
let nobody steal my vote....
It had been
What I didn't find was any sense of strong support for John Kerry as a
politician or a leader, or even a feeling of familiarity with him. The
personality of Bush seemed vivid among voters, whether they admired him or
hated him; the personality of Kerry was faint, indistinct, and where I found
its mark most strongly was among those Bush voters who saw the
I had seen Kerry speak two nights before in
The President tells us that in
Kerry's indictment of Bush's stewardship of the war was strong, but he
offered little by way of an alternative; his "new course in
For Kerry, this proved fatal. If Bush had succeeded in joining
Of course it is easy to say, as many have, that Kerry's policy
on
But Kerry's mistakes, however costly, in fact concealed a deeper problem,
which was that Democrats themselves, haunted by the traditional charge of
"weakness on national security" (which of course helped lead to
Kerry's nomination), were deeply divided on what should be done about the
Kerry might have done better to declare early on that
At about half past eight, as I stood amid the roiling sea of
jubilant Democrats outside that election supervisor's office in downtown
Jacksonville, I began to hear, through the civil rights songs and the laughter
and cheers, a distant, booming, amplified chant. One by one people in the crowd
before me heard it, and began turning to look down the street whence the
chanting came, and then to look at one another. The voices grew louder and
louder, and finally we saw their source: a group of twenty or so young men—they
looked like football players—led by a beefy fellow holding high a blue
Bush/Cheney sign, and chanting through a megaphone in a deep baritone:
Bush Won the State! Bush Won the State! Bush Won the
State!
The dream of a Democratic victory had been fueled by the enormous turnout
and by a handful of faulty exit polls. Everyone had believed it, even those
distinctly downcast Republicans I'd visited at their
The Democrats had come remarkably close. They had matched the Republicans in
fund-raising dollar for dollar and had mounted an unprecedented "ground game."
On election day they managed the impressive feat of
bringing eight million more voters to the polls than they had four years
before. But the Republicans managed to bring in eleven million additional
voters. George W. Bush, having gained half a million fewer votes than Al Gore
in 2000, defeated John Kerry by three million votes.[11]
Still, the victory was "narrow but clear," as William Kristol described it, with candor rare among Republicans
after the election. For all the talk of "moral values," had 60,000
Ohioans made a different choice on election day, we
would now be discussing the unpopularity of the
Now he faces a newly emboldened set of claimants. Though several million
more evangelical voters turned out in 2004, and thus were critical to Bush's
victory, they do not seem to have formed a higher percentage of Republican
voters than they had four years before.[12] Still, having
accounted, in their increased numbers, for a third of Bush's margin of victory,
the evangelicals unquestionably form the Republican Party's most reliable and
aggressive base of supporters. Their leaders have been quick and aggressive in
claiming full credit for the triumph and the press has been happy to play
along. As so often in politics, the appearance, through repetition, becomes its
own reality.
Leaders like the unabashedly direct Reverend Bob Jones III now demand, in
the name of moral values and the political redemption they claim to have
brought the President, that Bush "pass legislation defined by Biblical
norms" and that he "leave an imprint of righteousness upon this
nation that brings with it the blessings of Almighty God." This is a tall
order, and one fraught, like the war, with considerable political peril—from
moderate voters, who, for example, support outlawing "partial-birth
abortion" but oppose outlawing abortion itself; and even, perhaps, from
Democrats who may one day come to focus on what they have gained in this
election rather than what they have lost. After all the recriminations and all
the analyses of how the party must change, the fact remains that the Democrats
came very close to bringing off an almost unprecedented achievement: turning
out an incumbent president in a time of war. They failed, but not entirely;
they now confront a narrowly reelected president, encumbered with a grim and
intractable war, constrained by a huge deficit of his own creation, and faced
with increasingly extreme demands that will be satisfied only at great
political cost.
—
[1]
See The Road to Illegitimacy: One Reporter's Adventures in the 2000 Florida
Vote Recount (Melville House, 2004), based on "The Road to
Illegitimacy," The New York Review,
[2]
In 1996 Bill Clinton, the last president to win reelection, won by 8.5 percent
and 220 electoral votes; in 1964 Lyndon Johnson—who like Theodore Roosevelt had
not been elected but took office after the death of an incumbent—won by 22
percent and 434 electoral votes. To find an elected incumbent who won by nearly
as narrow a margin as George W. Bush, one must look back nine decades, to 1916,
when Democrat Woodrow Wilson won by 3.2 percent and 23 electoral votes.
[3]
Because of population gains recorded in the 2000 Census some states, like
[4]
These figures are drawn from Michael McDonald of
[5]
These numbers are all drawn from The New York Times/CBS News Poll, taken
in mid- to late October, with most, though not all, of the polling done between
October 28 and 30.
[6]
Ralph Reed, who had directed Bush's campaign in the Southeast, made this point
repeatedly, explicitly comparing Bush's rhetoric on terrorism and the
[7]
See Steven Kull et al., The
Separate Reality of Bush and Kerry Supporters (PIPA/Knowledge Networks,
[8]
See Matt Bai, "Kerry's Undeclared War," New
York Times Magazine,
[9]
See especially "How He Did It," Newsweek,
[10]
See, among others, Ron Brownstein, "Kerry Feels Squeeze on Iraq
Policy,"
[11]
Half of those votes came from the President's loyal supporters in the
"deep red" states—especially
[12]
Much less noticed, and in many ways more dramatic, was the upsurge in Catholics
voting for Bush, which was a true shift from four years ago. Kerry, a Catholic,
received 5 percent fewer Catholic votes than Al Gore, a Southern Baptist, and
these votes were critical in several swing states, especially