Bush's Triumph: 2004 Election: In Victory's Glow

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Having said that, surveys had consistently found that a majority of voters were ready to fire Bush--provided they had an acceptable alternative. That suggests how much Bush's success owes to Kerry's failure. The Senator never needed to be as likable as Bush to win, as Kerry proved when he defeated the popular Governor William Weld in their 1996 Senate race. Kerry just needed to be plausible. His supporters saw his serial explanations of his Iraq-war position as a mark of thoroughness and subtlety; opponents were alarmed by a sense that he was guided by no core beliefs but was only searching for a politically safe place to land. Bush was proud of setting a vision and then delegating even big decisions to a small group of advisers; Kerry was famously surrounded by enough advisers to fill a small liberal-arts college but still spent four weeks agonizing over the right font for his campaign logo. Kerry's résumé of élite schools, a prosecutor's office and the U.S. Senate honored his deliberative process; the presidential campaign proved too fast for it, and Bush never missed a chance to portray Kerry as the hollow man, ever expedient, always cautious, incapable of taking a stand and sticking to it.

Bush needed to demonize Kerry to make him an unacceptable alternative. The strategy carried some risk: negative ads over the summer portrayed Kerry as such a ridiculous, windsurfing, flip-flopping fop that when the cartoon version of Kerry didn't show up for the debates, Bush suffered in contrast. It was a rare miscalculation by a politician who understands well the value of low expectations. But overall, Bush succeeded in making Kerry appear an élitist emphatically defending moderation at a time when nothing less than passion would do. In Boston at their convention, the Democrats held a tasteful remembrance of 9/11. A month later in New York City, the Republicans unleashed a battle cry, and the contrast was plain: the party of victims vs. the party of warriors.

The past four years have rewired our politics in ways that guaranteed this election would be a historic one, whatever the outcome. The presidency simply matters more. To the delight of his supporters and the outrage of his opponents, George W. Bush governed as though he had won a mandate four years ago and, through his radical assertion of presidential power, showed what a difference it makes who is in the White House. With Congress all but dysfunctionally deadlocked, the spotlight for four years has focused entirely on the Executive Branch.

But in a second Bush term, Congress may be even more bitterly divided, making any legislative agenda hard to achieve. The initial goodwill that produced the No Child Left Behind Act is gone. The post-9/11 sense of national unity that produced the Patriot Act is gone. Bush has recently relied on disciplined party-line votes and seldom even pretended to try to reach a compromise with Democrats. He has admitted that this state of affairs is a disappointment, given his promise to unite and not divide. In an interview with TIME in August, he blamed the rancor on entrenched special interests, as though he were more victim than leader. Washington, he said, turned out to be a nastier place than Texas. But it is natural when the lines are so tightly drawn that neither side wants to hand the other a victory that it can take to the voters next time around.