That message alone was meant to be a source of comfort, particularly since he was also telling voters that everything had changed since the last time they elected a President and no amount of wishful thinking could turn the calendar back. After a happy and lucky decade, the U.S. is locked in a war that will last the rest of our lives. "The outcome of this election will set the direction of the war against terror," Bush said Saturday in Grand Rapids, Mich. Of Kerry, he argued that if you don't even admit it's a war, you can't be trusted to fight it. Critics who saw his faith in contagious democracy as naive may have missed the point that the American people have always been attracted to the idea. At the very least, voters may not punish a President for placing such hope in the principles they value most.

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 resume of elite 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 elitist 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.

For Kerry's supporters, there is some consolation that Bush will have to take responsibility for finishing what he started in Iraq. For Bush's supporters, there is an obligation to recognize that the intense effort of the other side was as much an expression of love of country as any pledge, hymn or flag. For people on both sides, there is relief that the day affirmed the sustaining virtue of American democracy. However fierce the battle and however high the stakes, on Election Day citizens go to the polls, close a curtain and cast their vote—and then go home to honor the outcome because we have only one President at a time.

—Reported by John F. Dickerson with Bush; Perry Bacon Jr. with Kerry; Matthew Cooper, Michael Duffy and Karen Tumulty/Washington; Eric Roston/Columbus; Wendy Cole/Chicago; Mitch Frank and Nathan Thornburgh/New York; Nancy Harbert/Albuquerque; Marc Hequet/Milwaukee; Sandeep Kaushik/Seattle; Brad Liston/Orlando; Wendy Malloy/Tampa; Tim Padgett/Miami; Michael Peltier/Tallahassee; Betsy Rubiner/Des Moines; Sean Scully/Philadelphia; and Stacy J. Willis/Las Vegas

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