“Two months ago when my Iowa supporters convinced me to participate in this straw poll, some pundits said I had nothing to gain and potentially a lot to lose,” a jubilant, goofy Bush gushed to his supporters under his tent. “Well thanks to you, we gained a lot … We jump-started our grass-roots organization for the main event, the Iowa caucuses.”

Bush’s victory seems slightly more significant in that this year’s event drew the biggest turnout in straw poll history. Over 23,000 Iowans voted this year — almost a quarter of the electorate in the last Iowa caucus. This compares with the 1979 straw poll, which drew only 1,454 voters; the 1987 straw poll, with 3,843; and the 1995 event, which drew 10,958. That last one ended as a rather suspicious tie between Gramm and the eventual party nominee, Bob Dole.

In addition, this year the voters had to be actual Iowans, as opposed to anybody with a pulse — the standard in ’95. Safeguards were taken this time around to prevent voter fraud, which was reportedly rampant four years ago.

Nevertheless, the vote on Saturday, which raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the Iowa state GOP, had its share of critics. “This isn’t democracy,” complained Rob Tully, head of the Iowa Democratic Party. “They’re handing these ballots out like candy.”

Calling the straw poll a “sham” that contributes to “the pessimism and the cynicism” Americans feel about the role of money in politics, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., boycotted the event, spending his weekend instead on a boat in the middle of Lake Powell in Arizona. (McCain’s opposition to ethanol subsidies hasn’t exactly endeared him to the Iowa farm community, so maybe it was just as well the senator boycotted the poll. His campaign is hardly catching on here, and he may even bypass the Iowa caucuses next January.)

Noting that the other nine candidates had collectively spent millions of dollars on the event — and underestimating the actual voter turnout — McCain spokesman Howard Opinsky estimated the cost of each vote at $5,000 to $10,000. “Why not just buy everyone a car?” Opinsky asked.

He had a point, though his figures were exaggerated.
Straw poll ballots cost $25, which the campaigns were only too happy to purchase for their voters. A few weeks ago, the two richest candidates got into a bidding war over the choicest tent spots outside the Hilton Coliseum at the Iowa State University campus. The Bushies ended up shelling out $43,500, while the Forbes campaign snatched up the spot right next door for only $8,000. A little further away from the action, the other candidates erected their tents, where they entertained their voters by serving up pork, shade and even the occasional celebrity.

Even with its cash-and-circus atmosphere, the straw poll has always been a good testing ground for bigger and better things. Bush can now claim that his appeal lies in more than the approval of the media and the GOP elite. But others claimed victory here as well. “Forbes did awfully well,” says Charlie Cook of the Cook Political Report. “He’s
going to have to be taken seriously.”

On the other hand, William Kristol of the Weekly Standard pointed out that “Forbes went to 77 [of Iowa's 99 counties]; Bush went to, I think, three. And Bush still beat him. The trouble for Forbes is, when is he ever going to have better circumstances? Money will never matter more.”

The third-place finisher, sugar-coated Red Cross dominatrix Elizabeth Dole, “did better than anybody who isn’t willing to blow the caps off” spending limits, said her campaign manager Tom Daffron. “We’re in a different economic class than the two who beat us.”

Daffron pointed out that Forbes is said to have poured more than $2 million into the contest, and “I don’t know what Bush spent. They claim to have only spent $750,000, but if you believe that, I got some aluminum siding I want to sell you.”

As a rough validation of the straw poll, Bush, Forbes and Dole also secured the top three places in a Harris Poll of 1,177 Iowans last week, with 42 percent of the Republicans choosing Bush, and 13 percent choosing both Forbes and Dole.

Lilliputian Christian conservative Gary Bauer scored fourth in the straw poll, which was a symbolic victory. Resounding defeats were handed to the kind-but-pathetic former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander, who has basically lived here since ’96, and Hoosier Dan Quayle, who, embarrassingly, finished behind even frothing preacher man Alan Keyes.

“The thing struck me the most is that 55 percent of the votes went to people who have never been elected to public office,” says Kristol. “Nos. 2 through 5 have never been elected to anything. I know the Bush people think that this is great — that Forbes and Dole and Bauer and Buchanan are not credible candidates — but this seems to me to be a new era of American politics, the era of Jesse Ventura and Warren Beatty. I mean, these people beat former vice presidents and governors and senators.”

No one could say how large the turnout would be in advance — but apparently in Iowa, if you build it, they will come. Too much so, by some accounts. In fact, it was so crowded that the fire marshal wouldn’t let anyone into the Hilton Coliseum between 4:30 and 6:30 p.m., during the candidates’ speeches and peak voting hours. Lines for polling places resembled those for Space Mountain. Former Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad reportedly had to wait in line for 45 minutes to cast his vote for Alexander.

For everyone but Bush, the real question here was whether anyone could emerge to mount a serious challenge to the Texas governor. Only a few weeks ago, for instance, GOP consultant Sal Russo received a phone call from Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch asking what Russo thought about his decision to throw his hat into the ring.

“Orrin, didn’t you hear?” Russo responded. “We already coronated George W. Bush!”

“You really think that?” Hatch asked. “You really think that it’s over? Because if you really think that, I won’t run.”

Russo says he thought about it a bit. Having worked for Ronald Reagan in four elections — ’68, ’76, ’80 and ’84 — he knew that even masters like the Gipper were doomed to stumble sooner or later. “Reagan faltered in all four of those races,” Russo says. “So there’s no question that a mere mortal like George W. Bush is going to falter.” Russo gave Hatch the green light.

Thus, with the exception of McCain, every Republican candidate put forth a valiant effort, pouring dollar after dollar into the Iowa funnel, riding their volunteers hard and mercilessly, crisscrossing the state from Mt. Pleasant to Clear Lake, Council Bluffs to Dubuque, urging, begging, pleading with recalcitrant Iowans for their votes.

A week ago, Scott Beattie, 32, an assistant Des Moines city attorney, was pulling out of a mall when he almost ran over Pat Buchanan.
“Somebody’s got to do something about this,” Beattie thought, “somebody
ought to put them to good use.” Beattie, a Republican, took out a $90 ad in the Des Moines Register that read: “Attention Presidential candidates. You need votes? I need a new roof. Reroof my house and you have my vote … Serious inquiries only.”

None took Beattie up on his offer, though they weren’t above all sorts of other groveling tactics. On Friday, I checked out the Dole 2000 Iowa headquarters in Des Moines, where cameras and posters were all methodically set up to “catch” Dole in the act of calling Iowans to get out the vote. Thank heaven I’m not diabetic, because as soon as she took a seat and started dialing, the sugar was suffocating.

“Skip? Good morning! Elizabeth Dole here. Are you ready for some good ol’ barbecue?” she sweet-talked one voter. Dole called the parents of one of her volunteers, a pretty high-schooler, and then put the girl on the line. As a dozen reporters eavesdropped, the girl gushed: “Mrs. Dole is just incredible. She gets me all excited just to hear her talk!”

Ugh.

Most of the rest of the candidates hit the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines that day, to shake hands, pet livestock, admire tractors and sample such delicacies as fried fat, pork, corn dogs, pork, fried ice cream and, of course, pork.

There, flipping pork, was Lamar Alexander — an eminently decent and qualified man who has visited 64 of Iowa’s 99 counties, but just can’t
sell the dog food. Beneath his veneer of genteel Southern goodwill, an unmistakably resentful bile is now stirring.

All Bush does is “race to raise money and go to photo ops,” Alexander steamed. “What I object to are those who look at this and say, ‘Well look at this, they’ve raised the money so they’re president.’ I mean what’s he going to do in a debate with Gore? He gets a tough question, he says, ‘Bring me my pile of money’?”

There was “Pitchfork” Pat Buchanan with his Buchanan brigades. Buchanan spent Friday morning spouting off at news radio WHO 1040′s
State Fair booth, mixing his common-folk protectionism with a good healthy dose of outright bigotry. At an event for supporters earlier this week, Buchanan had blamed the farm crisis on those “New York bankers” and “money boys up in New York.”

This day, a caller to WHO complained that Mexicans had secured a “foothold” in the United States and seemed well on their way to taking over. In response, Buchanan chatted up his idea of setting up an impenetrable wall of INS officers at the Rio Grande to prevent the “invasion” of more railroad killers — who, he argued, were representative of the Mexican people. (At almost that very moment, dozens of miles away, Bush was hosting an event for Latino voters.)

There was the disconcertingly awkward Forbes, family in tow. In the last few weeks before this vote, Forbes had dropped some of his pro-life pleas to Christian conservatives and defaulted to his old flat-tax mantra. Indeed, Iowa voters seemed to know only two things about Forbes, based on the commercials that have saturated their airwaves: his flat tax, and the fact that he has five daughters. (The Forbes 2000 site has the ad on Real Video for those interested.)

“I’ve been the one campaign that has put out real substance,” Forbes said when I caught up with him. “That’s what people want: substance. They’ve had enough of spin. They know now that spin is a form of substance abuse. I’ve been specific; the governor from Texas has been vague.”

A pack of younger male reporters followed Forbes around the fairgrounds for some time, at least as interested in Moira Forbes, 20, and Catherine Forbes, 22, as they were in the man mounting a credible challenge to Bush. Moira and Catherine were cute and charming enough, certainly, but their dad’s $430 million may also have been an attraction to this band of flatterers.

At one point, a busload of 42 teenage Hatch supporters entered the fair grounds. The Hatchlings, imported from Utah, seemed happy to be anywhere other than the bus where they’d just spent close to 24 hours.

Hatch assured Salon News that the fact that he “can work with Tom Harkin and Ted Kennedy and Chris Dodd” and “knows how to make Washington work,” was, in the end, going to send him to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Bauer sidled up to a mock straw poll at the FirStar Service Center booth — where anyone could put a straw in the paper cup of the candidate of his choice — and jokingly pinched a straw from Bush’s cup and put it in his own.

Quayle showed up, trumpeting his experience, with gray hair and golf paunch lending him age if not gravitas. Quayle is pleasant and much more articulate in person than you might expect. He can rattle off numbers and stats, and seems to relish his newfound status as a candidate of heft. The only bewilderment Quayle expressed was how Bauer, Buchanan, Dole, Forbes and Keyes — none of whom has ever held elected office — could even entertain the idea that they are somehow qualified for the most important job in the universe.

“Those people who have not been elected, you’ll have to ask them why they’re really running,” Quayle said to Salon News. “Believe me, it’s not going to happen.” The next day, however, all five finished ahead of Quayle in the straw poll.

“I think he should get out [of the race],” said Kristol, who was Quayle’s vice presidential chief of staff. “He’s a good man, and he’s served the country well, but it’d be better for him to get out now than to soldier on.”

By Saturday morning, the candidates were acting nervous. They started downplaying expectations. Dole’s people were talking as if the event had no meaning. (Though by the end of the day, they would change their tune — and start bashing McCain, their closest competitor in the way of a mainstream alternative to Bush.) Bauer said that no matter how hard he’d worked, there was no way of knowing whether it would pay off, because “there’s always an attrition rate.”

Steve Grubbs, a former state GOP chairman and a failed Senate candidate, agreed: “You never know. People might get up in the morning, and the line’s too long, or they decide they’ve got to work on their lawn.”

But as it turned out, more than enough people got up in the morning and came to the conclusion that there was no better place for them to be than standing in line for pork sandwiches served up by unctuous presidential candidates. Crowds flooded both ForbesLand, a field filled with enormous inflatable bouncy rides for kids, and the Bush country-western pavilion.

The Bush event was so large and had so many separate tents with celebrities that when Bush himself finally bounded onto the stage — to the tune of “God Bless Texas” — his speech overlapped with that of NFL Hall of Famer Roger Staubach, appearing in the Bush tent next-door.

Staubach’s fellow Bush supporters included superkicker Nick Lowery, world champion bass fisherman Johnny Morris, skeet shooting gold medalist Kim Rhode, and country stars Tracy Byrd and Linda Davis. Forbes hired Debby Boone; Alexander had Crystal Gayle and Miss Iowa USA; Hatch shipped in Karl “The Mailman” Malone of the Utah Jazz.

The Dole area was sprinkled with sorority sisters. “She’s a woman,” said
Lynse Briney, 20, an ISU Gamma Phi Beta, when asked why she supported Dole. “She’s a capable woman, a qualified woman.”

By contrast, the Bauer area was jammed with seated seniors who looked as if they were attending a church picnic. “This is a song about being sold out to what you believe in,” said the singer from Bauer’s Christian rock band. Former NFL-er and loose cannon Reggie White, a Bauer man all the way, ran around the fairgrounds trying to get his man’s rivals to sign an American Family Association pledge to support “traditional” family values.

While White was trying to marginalize some of America’s nontraditional families, Bush was opening his Big Tent to others outside the country’s mainstream, at a gathering of beer-swilling Harley riders who had vroomed in from Des Moines. There were about 400 “Bikers for Bush” — a group led by Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, R-Colo., and assisted by two bikers who gave their names as “Viper” and “Bitch.”

“I know that he was instrumental in repealing the mandatory helmet law in the state of Texas,” explained Don Baker, 43, of Marshalltown. “That was enough for me to come down here and listen to what else he stands for.”

By mid-afternoon, the atmosphere inside the Hilton Coliseum was primed for the climactic 13 minutes each allowed for speeches by the candidates — eight men in gray suits and the one woman in khaki. With pyrotechnical explosions, cheerleaders and the deep bass pumping the “Are you ready for this?” song so popular at NCAA games, the joint was packed and ready for action.

The first speaker, the fiery and somewhat unhinged Keyes, chose as his targets Clinton’s moral weaknesses and Bush’s $36 million. “My ancestors were bought and sold on the auction block of slavery — I will not be bought and sold on the auction block of our freedom!” he yelled. Voting for Bush would send the message that “Money is God, God is money, that’s what we worship and that’s what we serve,” Keyes said.

Keyes argued that the federal income tax constitutes a form of slavery. Other candidates, he said, “argue about whether our chains are a little heavier or a little lighter” — or, in an apparent reference to Forbes, whether “all our chains were of equal weight. I think it’s time that we struck off the chains of economic bondage!”

When his allotted time was used up, Keyes kept going, so (per the ground rules) his microphone had to be turned off mid-rant.

Poor Dan Quayle, I thought, seeing that he had to follow the lively Keyes; the poor guy just can’t cut a break.

But Quayle gave a surprisingly rousing speech, maybe one of the best of his career. The Clinton administration began like Woodstock 1969, Quayle said, to “great hope, great expectations, a lot of talk about harmony and unity. And it ended up the Woodstock of 1999, trashing our values, trashing our ideals and trashing our White House — which is not theirs to trash.”

But Clinton-bashing, however popular with the crowd, is almost irrelevant at this point in the primary season. For GOP wannabes, Bush-bashing is where it’s at. Among policy proposals (a tax cut, congressional term limits) and positions of principle (“The government should not do for the people what the people should do for themselves”) Quayle took shot after shot at his former boss’ son. George W. Bush’s campaign is about raising money, Quayle said, while his own is about raising families. The country can “ill afford another president who needs on-the-job training on foreign policy,” he said.

More pointedly, on the “character” front, Quayle snarked, “They say it doesn’t really matter what you did before you were 40 years old. Well, I’m proud of what I did before I was 40.”

Since Quayle was referring to the persistent rumors about Bush’s past, I asked Quayle pollster Kellyanne Fitzpatrick about the rampant yet entirely unproven reports that Bush had used cocaine. “Cocaine? I have no idea,” she said. “The only thing I know he snorts is all the money and all the excitement out of the presidential race.”

Steve Forbes’ speech was a fiasco of gargantuan proportions. Greeted with horns, explosions, balloons, a Forbes-beam circling the auditorium like the Bat-signal and the strains of “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” Forbes strode to the podium ready to perform.

But a huge pile of Forbes’ balloons had settled right next to his supporters’ seats, forming an irresistible target for all the bored kids who’d been dragged to the event. One after another, they started diving into the stacks of balloons, popping them loudly and harshly throughout Forbes’ entire speech, making it all but inaudible (and vaguely symbolic).

Next came Bush, offering nothing new to his vague and squishy appeal. (See the Bush stump speech I outlined back in June.)

Following Bush, Dole projected herself as strong and decisive, no doubt making her speech coach proud. The same qualities that make her seem so unbelievably phony in real life — her faux charm, deliberate mien, saccharine annunciation and off-putting inability to talk to you like a human being — work wonders on the stage.

Then, to the once again misused strains of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA,” Buchanan took the stage. He did his traditional CNN thing, with the added campaign nuance of a racist slam against China’s trade barriers, pledging that if the Chinese government doesn’t open its markets for Iowa farmers, it wouldn’t be able to sell “chopsticks” in this country.

I was sitting next to a Republican official who’d never heard Buchanan on the stump before, and when he delivered his chopsticks line she actually gasped.

Alexander, who will probably get out of the race in the next few days, delivered his perfectly respectable address. Soon enough, the house lights were turned on, the polls closed, the votes were counted, and the spin began.

Forbes said he “showed tonight that substance defeats glitz.” (Huh?) Dole’s minions were dispatched to tell the media that she had spent less per vote ($73) than the two men who bested her. Bush, if you believe that he only spent $750,000, came in at $101 per vote; Forbes at $406 per vote. Hatch somehow concluded that his last-place finish proved he was “in” the race.

As the sun rose on Sunday morning, hundreds of reporters crowded into the Des Moines airport to be shuttled back home. The Iowa Republican Party counted its money, probably well in excess of the predicted $500,000. Both eighth-place finisher Quayle and boycotter McCain jumped from Sunday morning news show to Sunday morning news show, belittling the importance of the festivity. Bauer said he wanted to go to the beach, but headed for New Hampshire instead, as did Quayle; Bush returned to Texas; Dole hosted a thank-you reception for the sorority girls.

As for the 2.8 million Iowans who didn’t have anything to do with the straw poll, it was just another hot day in the country, a perfect day, say, for eating some pork.

Now that Mitt Romney has won the Republican nomination, two key features prevail over the 2012 campaign — and both were also plainly evident in 2004. First, the incumbent president’s reelection fortunes are far from certain; and, second, the incumbent faces a decent but nevertheless weak challenger who is further hampered by internal problems within his party’s coalition.

Because incumbents can’t run for reelection promising “change,” and because “hope” during a lingering recession was also off the menu, the Obama campaign’s 2012 theme of  “forward” — a word that often follows “plow,” mind you — was the best available alternative. That said, and substituting the economy for terrorism, Obama is implicitly if not explicitly advancing the same theme Bush did in 2004: America suffered a tough blow, but the situation could have been worse and, more to the point, under my stewardship the nation is steadily regaining its footing.

This counterfactual campaign theme — vote for me not because of what happened, but what might have but didn’t — is a common thread for Bush and Obama. It’s not an uplifting message, but it sufficed in 2004 and Obama is counting on it working again in 2012.

Politics 101 further dictates that when an incumbent’s reelection is in doubt, he must go negative against the challenger. Obama political operatives in the White House and at the Democratic National Committee long ago made it abundantly clear they were willing to do just that. Team Obama may not go negative against Romney to the degree the Bush camp did against John Kerry in 2004. (By mid-summer 2004, 75 percent of Bush’s TV ads were negative attacks on Kerry.) But don’t be surprised if attacks on Romney’s record and even character are plentiful, harsh and relentless. In 2008, America saw candidate Obama’s toothy grin; four years later, expect to see President Obama’s fangs.

Expect the Obama camp to emphasize two major critiques of Romney: that he is a flip-flopper willing to say anything or reverse any position to win; and that he is an economic royalist whose personal and public life suggest a person incapable of understanding the lives and struggles of average Americans. Again — note the unusual parallels with 2004.

Although Romney is a Republican former governor and Kerry was at the time his state’s Democratic junior U.S. senator, the two Massachusetts pols make for similar targets. Each man is an extraordinarily rich preppie and Ivy Leaguer. Each represents the liberal wing of his respective party. Each has shown a propensity for ruining an otherwise valid point with sloppy, backfiring language. And each has a reputation for lacking political spine.

The flip-flop frame is candidate character assassination of the first order. Like the lone negative number in a string of multiplied positives, the critique that nobody can trust any statement or claim made by a politician has the potential to negate every accomplishment or promise. If it sticks, it can be fatal, as Kerry learned in 2004.

Obama and the Democratic National Committee know their electoral history and, sure enough, last November — a year before the election and two full months before a single Iowan had caucused — the DNC released a four-minute “Mitt vs. Mitt” ad and its accompanying website with the damning tag line, “the story of two men trapped in one body.” The site is a brilliant homage to the Bush campaign’s 2004 windsurfer attack ad and the devastating, 11-minute ad the Republican National Committee produced chronicling Kerry’s “evolution” on Iraq.

And then there is what might be called “the Willard factor”: Romney as Richy Rich, the Monopoly Guy with the Bain Capital background and the Swiss bank account. His bio would be political gold to Romney’s opponent any election cycle, but it’s gold-plated platinum in the first full presidential campaign following the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression, the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the long overdue national debate over income inequality.

Again, the wealth-personified line of attack mirrors the out-of-touch, Martha’s Vineyard yoke the Bush team put around Kerry’s neck in 2004. Right on cue, in the first public event of his reelection campaign, last week Obama attacked Romney by name and invoked the economic disconnect card with relish. “He sincerely believes that if CEOs and wealthy investors like him make money the rest of us will automatically prosper as well,” said Obama of Romney, adding that “corporations aren’t people – -people are people.” (For the record, Kerry is actually wealthier than Romney, who would become one of the richest men ever to occupy the White House, should he win.)

Obama will also try to shift the national debate toward areas of strength, as Bush did. Historically, this meant the same strategy, but with inverse implications for each party: The so-called mommy party Democrats would encourage voters to focus on more favorable kitchen-table economy issues — healthcare, jobs, education — and away from less favorable “daddy party” Republican issues surrounding foreign wars abroad and culture wars. Because Obama is net-positive in foreign policy approval and net-negative on the economy, rather than mirroring by inversion, Obama will try to duplicate Bush’s shift-in-emphasis in 2004. GOP complaints that Obama is politicizing the killing of Osama bin Laden reveal Republican fears that Obama is going to play the terrorism card in 2012 just like Bush did eight years ago.

The 2004 parallels extend beyond message. Obama will be amply resourced and enjoy a field technology by virtue of his campaign’s state-of-the-art Web, donor, volunteer and social media innovations. Remember the Bush reelection campaign’s vaunted “72-hour” voter turnout model? That seems like an Edsel compared to the Ferrari the Obama team will be sporting this summer and fall. Among the perquisites modern presidential incumbents enjoy is the option to test-drive the best mobilization machines before anyone else.

Finally, what most connects Obama 2012 to Bush 2004 is the stability of the electoral map itself. Only three states — two net to Bush — flipped from one party to the other between 2000 and 2004; only nine states flipped between 2004 and 2008. Split the difference and a good, back-of-the-napkin over-under for number of states likely to flip between 2008 and 2012 is six. And thus, like the lead sailboat during a windless race, Obama doesn’t need or want conditions to change much from 2008: He merely has to replicate the map that swept him into office, with the burden of figuring out how to shake up the Electoral College falling to Romney, just as it did for Kerry against Bush. Even Karl Rove’s mapping of the 2012 election concedes this reality.

The 2008 election was memorable; to borrow the title of one best-selling chronicle, it was a “game changer.” But 2012 will not be. In many respects, it will be a game repeater, with Obama playing Bush to Romney’s Kerry of 2004. The president may be asking Americans to look “forward” in 2012, but the best preview of his reelection campaign can be found by looking backward eight years.

Republicans lost their popularity on security issues for one reason: George W. Bush’s foreign policy was a disaster. And yet, the party’s nominee, Mitt Romney, has assembled a foreign-policy team composed almost exclusively of individuals with the same war-always mentality and ideology that served Bush — and the United States — so poorly. In some cases, the exact same men responsible for Bush’s catastrophic national security policies are advising Romney. The former Massachusetts governor could have included some of the pragmatists and realists from the George H.W. Bush administration. Instead, a Romney presidency seems like it would be Bush 43 all over again.

Richard Grenell, who served as United Nations spokesman under Bush, may be gone from the Romney campaign after an uproar over his sexuality, but there are plenty more former Bushies. First off, there are Romney’s “special advisors.” There’s Michael Chertoff, W.’s Homeland Security director. Chertoff oversaw DHS’s failures during Hurricane Katrina, and amassed unprecedented powers of secrecy. Next up is Eliot Cohen, counselor to the State Department for Bush’s last two years and on the Defense Policy Advisory Board for the president’s entire term. Cohen was an adamant supporter of the Iraq War and advised Bush directly on the issue. Or take Cofer Black, the man who infamously said to Bush in September 2011 about al-Qaida that “When we’re through with them they will have flies walking across their eyeballs.” Black went on to become chairman of Blackwater, where he resigned after the company illegally bribed Iraqi officials.

Then there are the 13 “working groups” composed of equally worrisome individuals. The Middle East and North Africa Working Group is co-chaired by Bush’s Assistant Secretary of Defense Mary Beth Long, and Meghan O’Sullivan, Bush’s special assistant and deputy national security advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan. The remaining co-chair is Walid Phares, who never worked for Bush but advised Lebanese warlords in the 1980s. Romney has reportedly promised Phares a top job in his administration, despite his virulently anti-Islamic views.

All told, Romney lists 37 holdovers from the George W. Bush administration — the very same administration he and all other Republican candidates barely referenced during their many debates because it was so discredited and toxic, even to the Republican base.

It didn’t have to be this way. There are, in fact, people in Republican circles who are sensible on international affairs. The Cato Institute, in particular, has experts that could dramatically change the direction of American foreign policy. Men like Justin Logan and Christopher Preble were prescient on Iraq and a host of other issues. Similarly, the Center for the National Interest (formerly the Nixon Center) has a host of solid scholars, including ones like Dimitri Simes and Geoffrey Kemp, who have valuable government experience in the Nixon and Reagan administrations, respectively, and a history of perceptive analysis. Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, would have been another good pick.

So why aren’t guys like this being tapped? Why is the GOP sticking with a discredited foreign-policy approach rather that looking to its own past for wiser counsel? “Most of the realists and pragmatists have simply been driven out of the Republican Party,” says Stephen Walt, who writes a blog at Foreign Policy and teaches at Harvard. “The neoconservatives have been driving the agenda since Bush was elected and they remain well-entrenched.”

Another factor is that the Republican Party’s base remains strongly militaristic and reluctant to recognize limits on American power. Jon Huntsman’s failed presidential campaign illustrated that problem. The good news is that nobody seems to be calling for nation-building and occupying foreign countries in the mold of Iraq and Afghanistan. But that’s the only lesson that seems to have been learned from the last decade of foreign-policy debacles.

Finally, it may just be that the United States has too much power to change course. While the Unites States has undoubtedly made disastrous decisions in the last decades, it is so powerful that it is largely insulated from the consequences of them. If Romney’s foreign-policy advisor list is anything to go by, a Romney administration would have to teach the U.S. all over again about the problems with trying to police the world. Prepare for Bush redux.

Based on published histories and his firsthand observations, and adapted from a lecture delivered in November, the article calls the administration’s rationale for its use of torture — which he nonetheless insists only on calling “extreme interrogation” and “coercive methods” — “radical,” “an amazing contention,” “untenable and extreme,” “unsustainable,” “an unprecedented program of coolly calculated dehumanizing abuse and physical torment,” and, finally, simply a “mistake.” He concludes: “This was a collective failure of American public leadership, in which a number of officials and members of Congress (and staffers) of both parties played a part, endorsing a CIA program of physical coercion without any precedent in U.S. history.”  In fact, “The only defense against criminal prosecution would be that officials acted in good faith reliance on the advice of their government lawyers.”

Part of what makes Zelikow’s analysis so damning and definitive is its judiciousness. The article is deeply empathetic of the uniquely fearful situation under which the Bush administration was initially operating. Zelikow calls the Sept. 11 attacks a “collective trauma” and a “shoc[k] to mass beliefs.” He notes that Bush and others spent time in burn units, morgues and with survivors of the attacks. One traumatic experienced often overlooked — overlooked because it appeared in Stephen Hayes’ stenographic biography of Dick Cheney — was that the vice-president’s daughter was (falsely, it turns out) told that her house with her children in it had tested positive for anthrax. Similarly, Cheney and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice were told that they and others had been exposed to an extremely lethal toxin in a particular area of the White House — and might soon die as a result. “The alarms did not stop and they too were not abstract … The pressure on Bush and his senior advisers was so direct because so much of the response had to be invented and improvised,” the article reads.

An additional factor in the power of the article is Zelikow’s credibility and history. Before entering government, he was a civil rights lawyer in Texas battling the Ku Klux Klan and then a highly esteemed Harvard historian specializing in U.S. foreign policy — he co-authored one book with Rice. He then served on the National Security Council under President George H.W. Bush and directed the 9/11 Commission before becoming counselor to Rice at the State Department from 2005 to 2007. He currently volunteers part-time on the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board under President Obama.

Such bipartisan, establishment credentials render the breakdown and conclusion of this article all the more damning. He believes that what should have been a political and moral question — should the United States torture captives? — became strictly a legal matter left up to government lawyers, few of whom had any experience with these issues, and who had to take the necessity of extreme measures as a given. “These lawyers then became secular priests, granting absolution to the supplicant policymakers,” Zelikow writes.

The problems began when the Office of the Vice President and the CIA took central roles in policymaking. Cheney felt himself above the rest of the National Security Council, bypassing Rice and other traditional channels of national security policymaking. Ad-hoc decision-making and improvisation became “a habit of thought,” which seemed initially to pay off in the security of the nation, as well as in Bush’s political standing and self-confidence.

With Cheney and CIA head George Tenet “the key entrepreneurs in setting codes of conduct for the War on Terror,” it was essentially left to their obsequious lawyers to decide, in secret, on the interrogation methods America should employ. Bush even told the Senate’s Intelligence Committee chairman that “the vice president should be your point of contact … [He] has the portfolio for intelligence activities.” Decisions were made to jettison international treaties. By December 2001, the CIA was already interested in reverse-engineering methods “heretofore used only to treat Americans to resist enemy torture.” When a senior al-Qaida member was captured in March 2002, the prototype for the administration’s torture policies was already developed. “So, for the first time in American history, leaders of the U.S. government carefully devised ways and means to torment enemy captives.”

Zelikow notes that “None of the policy or moral issues connected with these choices appear to have been analyzed in any noticeable way.” Perhaps worst of all, no serious consideration was given to weighing the costs of benefits of the torture program, with reference to relevant historical precedents and/or examinations of the respective French, British and Israeli experiences in dealing with captured terrorists. “Bush and Rice should have insisted on this,” Zelikow writes.

The 52-page article observes the successes of Obama’s counterterrorism policies after repudiating the use of torture. On the basis of the empirical evidence then, “[t]here is no evident correlations between intelligence success and the available of extreme interrogation methods,” no matter what Bush and Cheney claim. Finally, “The program’s costs — which include the high-level effort expended in order to establish, maintain, and defense the program — appear on the evidence so far to have well outweighed any unique value the program might have had as a method of counterterrorism intelligence collection.” This is apart from the damage to America’s international standing and corrosion of its traditional values.

Zelikow concludes his analysis by arguing that, although the Obama administration has the right to wage war and use extralegal methods to defeat al-Qaida, its claim of that authority to defeat “associated forces” is unwarranted. “The U.S. government should publish and explain any overarching policy and legal documents that guide and confine the conduct of deadly operation against its foreign enemies … the executive branch of the U.S. government has a duty to articulate the scope of its warfare to the Congress and the public.” The Bush administration’s unprecedented elevation of torture to national policy may be history, but the job to get U.S. foreign policy in line with its constitutional and moral obligations is far from over.

That’s quite a fall for a man who frequently spoke of his Christian faith and family values when asked to comment on the mammoth success of his brand in the early 2000s. “When I got saved, God became my art agent,” Kinkade explained in a 2004 video. He went from a childhood in Placerville, Calif. (invariably characterized as “hard-scrabble”) to an apprenticeship selling his work in supermarket parking lots to his apotheosis as the nation’s “most profitable” artist, the Painter of Light™, and multimillionaire. He was profiled in the New Yorker by Susan Orlean.

I first learned about the dark side of the Painter of Light™ — sorry, couldn’t resist that one — when I reviewed “his” novel, “Cape Light,” in 2002. The novel, first in a series, was produced much as his paintings are: by a semi-industrial process in which low-level apprentices embellish a prefab base provided by Kinkade. He wasn’t the only artist to work in this way; he wasn’t even the only novelist. To the best of my knowledge, his novels — heartwarming, fuzzily pious tales of small-town life — have been coming out ever since, one more facet of a lifestyle brand that, at its most ambitious, included an entire Thomas Kinkade-themed housing development.

My review was just a goof intended to amuse Salon’s readers, but after it appeared, I began to receive emails from people who had sunk their life savings in Thomas Kinkade Signature Galleries (essentially, mall and shopping-district outlets for his prints) and been fleeced. I didn’t really understand how the financial architecture of Kinkade’s gallery empire worked, and I sure didn’t share their taste in wall art, but these people struck me as decent and sincere. They’d believed in Thomas Kinkade — not just in the man or the company, but in the ethos supposedly represented by his work, one in which (to quote Kinkade’s introduction to “Cape Light”) “people have the time to savor life’s simple pleasures” and lead “deep, satisfying lives.”

My conversations with these victims made me uneasy. Was there some relationship between the franchisees’ naivete, perhaps even their willful self-delusion, and their terrible taste? Was it hopelessly snobby to wonder that? What about Kinkade himself? He seemed to be at best a hypocrite and at worst a crook. Was there a meaningful connection between his bad conscience and his bad art? German thinkers of the 1930s would have said so, and they had plenty of opportunity to observe bad fascist art up close. Hermann Broch maintained that someone who chooses to make kitsch is “ethically depraved, a criminal willing radical evil.” The novelist Milan Kundera believes kitsch to be the natural expression of totalitarianism. That’s a lot of moral weight to place on a bunch of garish cottage paintings, but Kinkade was always the first to present his work as a form of ideology.

I felt compassion for the ripped-off gallery operators, and at the same time I was aware that quite a few of them had probably also fallen for the similarly sanctimonious, bogus folksiness of George W. Bush, thereby subjecting our nation to one of the worst presidents in its history. Kinkade and Bush struck me as of a piece, probably because they had both borrowed from Ronald Reagan in promising that we could get back to a better way of life that never existed in the first place. In nearly every encounter with the press, Kinkade delivered a diatribe against the art-world “establishment” that had shut him out. They were “elites” touting unfathomable, downer junk to hardworking people who needed uplift instead. Art snobs were the aesthetic counterparts of the so-called liberal elites, a group that surely included me.

At the same time, I must admit that I, too, like a cottage. Granted, I like the stylized, art-deco kind painted on bone china, rather than the insanely detailed and phosphorescently lit specimens in Kinkade’s pictures. And I’m in little danger of equating my new teacup with a Brancusi just because it’s cheerier. Nevertheless, I suspect that my idea of what’s pleasing about a cottage isn’t too different from that of Kinkade’s fans: an aura of harmless coziness, of modest domestic beauty and comfort not too cut off from the past. It’s as if we’re speaking the same word, but in different languages.

I suspect this is why Kinkade’s paintings have exerted their weird, hypnotic effect on me. They are so preposterous (especially the stream-side ones; he really needed to sit down with an architect and go over the basics of drainage), so awful. And yet I can still detect — beneath that cacophony of hollyhocks and cobblestones and snapdragons — the whisper of something intelligible. I’m pretty sure I know why the hordes of Kinkade collectors love his work, even if I don’t like it myself. Kinkade’s paintings are irredeemably false, like all kitsch, but through them you can just barely glimpse the honest desires they seek to exploit, sinking under the dreck.

Kundera defined kitsch as “the absolute denial of shit,” meaning it offers an airbrushed, sterilized, sentimentalized view of the world. From that, it doesn’t necessarily follow that art wallows in shit, but art doesn’t exist for the primary purpose of denying it, either. Kitsch is, first and foremost, a lie; its very existence is founded on bad faith.

Kinkade, like Bush, peddled a falsely simplified image of the world — one without mildew or flooded basements, for one thing — which, no surprise, turned out to be plastered over a whole lot of stinky stuff. The true believers, the ones who bought into these men the most during the 2000s, ended up paying some of the highest prices, from the Kinkade acolytes who invested in his gallery Ponzi scheme to the working-class red-staters who sent off their kids to die in a pointless war. Bad taste, harmless as it may seem, can end up costing you a lot.

Further reading

Los Angeles Times obituary for Thomas Kinkade

Susan Orlean’s 2001 profile of Thomas Kinkade for the New Yorker

A 2006 Los Angeles Times story documenting Kinkade’s business problems

Salon’s Janelle Brown visits Hiddenbrooke, a Kinkade-theme housing development in Northern California

Laura Miller reviews “Cape Light,” a novel by Thomas Kinkade and Katherine Spencer