That is the Washington aspect of the story. But out in the country, the signs are not so encouraging and the future looks less bright. Bush may have changed the tone in Washington for the better. But in the rest of the nation, Democrats have continued to change it for the worse.

Just after the Florida election drama drew to a close, an African-American staffer for one of the Republican House leaders was having a Christmas dinner with his family, when his 12-year-old niece asked this question: “Now that Bush has been elected president, am I going to be treated as three-fifths of a human being?”

The same anecdote with slight variations has been reported from all ends of the country. A teacher at a rural black elementary school in South Carolina e-mailed and told me that her students were asking essentially the same question: Now that Bush was president, would they be made slaves again? In the April 30 issue of the Weekly Standard, Eric Cohen reports taking a group of black fourth and fifth graders from a Washington housing project to an outing in the nation’s capital. The trip was taken just after the Inauguration. A few days earlier, a man had been arrested for firing shots at the White House. Cohen asked the children what they thought of their new president.

“When I heard about the shooting I was pretty happy,” said one of the boys with a laugh. “I thought Bush might have got shot.” Other comments were just as bitter.

“President Bush is going to put us all back in slavery.”

“He’s going to round up all the black people and kill them.”

Where on earth could these black youngsters be getting ideas like that? The Democratic Party perhaps? The Democratic Party’s presidential candidate? The leadership of the civil rights movement? The inescapable answer is this: all three.

During the campaign, the Democratic Party and the NAACP sponsored millions of dollars of ads on television and black radio accusing Bush of supporting hate crimes like the lynching of James Byrd Jr., incarcerating “75 percent of minority youth in Texas” and maliciously executing blacks and Hispanics on death row. It was Al Gore who, in an election campaign attack on Bush’s alleged judicial preferences, repeated the libel claiming that the framers of the Constitution regarded a black person as “three-fifths of a human being.” (This is one of the most widely believed myths in black America today. In fact, it was not “blacks” as such, who were so designated but slaves — there were thousands of free blacks — and it was the anti-slavery Framers who insisted on the three-fifths figure in order to diminish the electoral power of the slave South.) And it was Democratic and NAACP spokesmen in Florida who described the voting booth mess as a “return to slavery.”

In sum, every element of the anti-Republican paranoia rampant in African-American communities throughout this nation was deliberately planted there by the Democratic Party and the civil rights leadership. Nor did the racial slanders end with Bush’s election. The nomination of John Ashcroft for attorney general was turned into a star chamber proceeding reminiscent of 17th century Salem, when a man without blemish on his public record was interrogated as though he was a modern day witch: Mr. Ashcroft, are you now or have you ever been pro-slavery?

Has everyone lost their senses? Slavery has been dead for 136 years, and there has never been a movement to revive it. Thousands of free African-Americans actually fought for the Confederacy, yet John Ashcroft was nearly denied the position of attorney general because in an interview with an obscure historical journal he praised the loyalty of Confederate leaders to their cause!

The fact is, that in the nation’s public political arena, we have lost our senses. Or, rather, have been beaten senseless by the racial McCarthyism of the left. Republicans — and others — had better learn how to combat this latter-day witch-hunting hysteria or surrender the fight in advance to any political opponent who is willing to employ a race-baiting attack.

Ashcroft is now paying penitential visits to black churches to demonstrate that he really isn’t a witch. He has announced that eliminating “racial profiling” — a principal demand of the race-baiting left — will be a top Justice Department priority. Will this political appeasement of his persecutors work?

The visits to black churches are good in themselves — it’s time that Republicans reached out in a big way to African-American communities. But they will not buy Ashcroft peace. Not unless he surrenders to the left and gives up his conservative ideas.

The same rule applies to the Bush administration, which has also signed on to the campaign against “racial profiling.” Bush is a good and decent man, and there is not a racist bone in his body. There is more racial animus in a single speech of NAACP president Kweisi Mfume or Jesse Jackson or Rev. Al Sharpton than in all the words that George W. Bush has uttered in his entire life. Yet these men, and the Democratic Party, have willfully caused black children all over America to think of Bush as a “racist” who would put them back in chains.

This will not go away with symbolic gestures like visiting churches or genuflections to left-wing causes like ending “racial profiling.” It will only go away when the demagogues are exposed — when those under attack are willing to call racial McCarthyism by its proper name and fight back on the issues themselves.

The symbolic aspect of the administration’s gesture on racial profiling is sound. It is saying “we hear your concern.” The problem is that there is no way to end “racial profiling” as the NAACP and Democrats define it except by giving up the fight against crime.

Black males will always be stopped and arrested in far greater numbers than they make up in the population because black males commit violent crimes in far greater numbers than they make up in the population. Black males, who represent 6 percent of the population, commit more than 40 percent of violent crimes. In New York City, based on victim reports, a black male is 13 times more likely to have committed a violent crime than a white male. How are the police going to avoid stopping a greater percentage of black males than white, if they are to protect citizens from the criminals who prey on them?

Readers who do not understand this proposition should read Heather MacDonald’s meticulous analysis “The Myth of Racial Profiling” in the current issue of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal from which the following data is taken.

The racial profiling crusade began with a New Jersey Turnpike stop of suspected African-American drug dealers. Under a deafening media barrage powered by the Jesse Jackson-Al Sharpton-NAACP left and abetted by Bill Bradley, Al Gore and the Democratic Party machine, the Republican administration in New Jersey caved to the anti-profiling cause. A report was issued, which “confirmed” that there was indeed racial profiling by New Jersey cops, thus giving life support to the myth. The report’s conclusion was based on the fact that 53 percent of the people stopped and searched by officers looking for drug dealers were black, while blacks make up only 13.5 percent of the population in the state.

When an embarrassing photo of New Jersey’s then-Republican Gov. Christie Todd Whitman frisking a black suspect was published in the press, she and her Attorney General Peter Verniero capitulated to the demagogues and certified the statistics, assuring the public that this unacceptable racial profiling would be stopped. In February 1999, Whitman fired the head of the state police, to emphasize the point.

In an atmosphere in which racial demagoguery has made politics surreal, facts like these do not appear to present a problem. Testifying on racial profiling before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2000, New Jersey Sen. Robert Toriccelli assured the committee: “Statistically, it cannot bear evidence [sic] to those who suggest, as our former superintendent of state police suggested, that certain ethnic or racial groups disproportionately commit crimes. They do not.” Well, Senator, actually they do.

As MacDonald points out in her essay, blacks make up over 60 percent of arrests in New Jersey for drugs and weapons violations. “Against such a benchmark,” she concludes, “the state police search rates look proportionate.” MacDonald also points out that 64 percent of the homicide victims in drug turf wars are black and 60 percent of victims and perpetrators in drug-induced fatal brawls are black, which computes with the fact that 60 percent of the drug offenders in state prison are also black. “Unless you believe that white traffickers are less violent than black traffickers, the arrest, conviction and imprisonment rate for blacks on drug charges appears consistent with the level of drug activity in the black population.”

And what is the result of ignoring these realities and outlawing “racial profiling” in the state of New Jersey? MacDonald reports that since the Whitman surrender, “Drug arrests dropped 55 percent on the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey in 2000, and 25 percent on the turnpike and parkway combined.” The inescapable conclusion: Unless you believe that drug dealers have responded to these facts by decreasing their own activity, then it’s apparent that the civil rights leadership, the Democratic Party and their Republican appeasers have increased the flow of narcotics to New Jersey’s inner city African-American communities along with all the destructive consequences that implies.

If Ashcroft and the Bush administration follow the pattern of appeasement and proceed down the politically correct path to the world the Democrats are demanding, two things are certain. The mainly minority victims of minority criminal predators will multiply, and the Democratic Party, waving the bloody shirts of racial persecution and Republican insensitivity, will march to victory at the polls. Think of Whitman, the poster girl of racial profiling. Would her capitulation to the left have prompted the constituencies seduced by its myth to vote for her in the next election?

There are only two ways to combat this political pathology. The first is to fight it on the only ground feasible, which is that of reality. The facts must be aired; the demagoguery must be exposed. The second is to beat back the racial McCarthyites by calling them to account.

Let us begin with the reality. “Racial profiling” is only an injustice if it is profiling solely on the basis of race. There have been recent cases of rogue police officers and even rogue departments targeting minorities like blacks because they are black. This is offensive and inexcusable, and the Ashcroft Justice Department should take every measure available to see that it is stopped.

But where “profiling” means that race is but one element in a clearly defined criminal dossier, it must be defended on its merits, because — among other things — it is the best way to protect minorities themselves. That is the way to present the case for sound police methods against the attacks of the racial McCarthyites. While blacks do commit over 40 percent of the violent crimes, the overwhelming majority of their victims are black as well. In order to protect vulnerable communities, which are overwhelmingly black, non-racist profiling is actually necessary. Unless politicians like Ashcroft have the courage to explain this, and stand up to their ideological opponents, the left will roll over them, and the people will suffer — and the victims will be mainly poor and black.

The profiling dilemma is characteristic of the challenge the Bush administration — and Republicans generally — face on the racial front. If Republicans are to succeed, they must not succumb to the illusion, as they did during the election, that they can fly under the radar and avoid the issue and the Democrats’ racial attacks. In the next election, this will not be an option because the political dynamics have changed as a result of the last election. The results show that for Democrats the race issue is not a tactic they can do without. In the last election, Democrats required 92 percent of the black vote, and the inflammatory race-baiting that secured it, just to stay even.

Now Bush has appointed the most diverse Cabinet in American history, moved into the black community with his faith-based initiatives and shown that he is ready to contend with Democrats everywhere for the minority vote. This means that for Democrats — now more than ever — the race card represents political survival, which for political animals like the Democrats means life itself.

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