As light rain fell off and on along Pennsylvania Avenue, I spent five hours walking the fence, talking to tourists, observing security. It was, by all accounts, a fairly normal Monday, and I, of course, had no hint of what was coming.

Neither did the many tourists who spent the day flocking to the famous wrought-iron fence. Invariably, they would approach with excitement, squint past the black rails for 10 seconds or so, then scramble for the camera. Most wanted to get the shot, the prized photo showing them standing tall with the celebrated house framed just over their left shoulder. Some stared through the fence a moment or two after completing the photo, as if expecting to see George W. Bush or his cheerful wife hanging around on the porch.

At one point, a man stepped up onto one of the squat concrete barricades placed at the perimeter of the White House to deter truck bombers. He was only trying to get a better look. But a second or two later, a deep voice came out of nowhere: “Sir, get down. Get down from the barricades. Now.”

Down the street, a D.C. police officer was talking into a microphone. His range of vision was impressive, but I didn’t see how he was going to stop any determined attempt to scale the fence. Perhaps the security measures themselves were part of the tourist package, I thought, a bit of pomp and circumstance to remind us of just how important this White House was.

And maybe we needed that reminder. The White House looked disappointingly small to me, set so far back, surrounded by such mighty neighbors. The Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial were easily more majestic; the Old Executive Office Building next door was noticeably larger, far more ornate; the Capitol was a clearly more imposing symbol of command and muscle. The White House, from certain angles, resembled nothing more than an astonishingly luxurious high school — quite nicely landscaped, remarkably clean, but basically a squat building with thick pillars and a big front door.

I loitered near the fence longer than most people that morning, formulating my architectural opinions. Eventually I crossed the street to Lafayette Park, chatted with Frank, a retiree in a striped dress shirt and pastel blue shorts. He was feeding the squirrels. “I don’t know what it is about the squirrels that makes me like them so much,” he giggled, tossing peanuts. “It must be the tails.”

Frank was out here nearly every day. “You never know what might happen,” he explained. “Just last week a man tried to jump the fence.” This occurred not far from where we stood. “Like they’re going to let him get to the White House,” he laughed. “I saw a picture of him in the paper. They had him tackled, all down on the ground and everything, within seconds.”

So perhaps I was wrong about the security. It was apparently more than show.

This became clear when I moved to the E Street side, closest to the Washington Monument. Here, where pedestrians and vehicles enter for White House business, armed officers, bomb-sniffing dogs and automated steel barricades were in place. Impressive measures for a peacetime White House, but of course, they wouldn’t stop another someone like Corder, the maniac who flew his Cessna right over the fence in 1994, slamming into a tree near the South Portico steps. President Clinton and his family were not in the residence at the time, but Corder was killed on impact.

Shortly after Corder’s flight, former CIA director Richard Helms expressed grave concern. “For years I have thought a terrorist suicide pilot could readily divert his flight from an approach to Washington to blow up the White House,” he said. “It has been said that the Secret Service is primed for just such a venture. Perhaps so, but the episode this week hardly gives one much confidence.”

At about the time that I was considering all of this — ignorant, of course, as to just how dismally prophetic Helms’ words would almost turn out to be — a brawny D.C. police officer came along and rapidly cleared the sidewalk. “You’ll have to move,” he barked, his tone suggesting that we would do best to follow his orders quickly and without question. “You’ll have to get across the street.”

A young woman with two children was having trouble — her youngest refused to get back into his stroller. I expected the officer to help, but he didn’t. “You have to leave the sidewalk, ma’am,” he insisted. “You have to leave now.” She grabbed her son by the elbow and yanked him along, panic in her eyes.

It was not clear why we were being moved so abruptly, and in my unfamiliarity with White House protocol, I thought for a moment that something was seriously amiss. I managed to cross E Street to where the 30 or so tourists had regrouped, and saw hands pointing to the White House roof. Sharpshooters had appeared.

Then, almost in a blink, the southeast gate was surrounded by motorcycle police, squad cars, Park Service jeeps. Moments later, the Secret Service vans began to roll, along with two long black limousines, sporting American flags.

In the second limo, through darkened windows, I caught a glimpse of the president himself, smiling in his halfhearted way, waving to us from the back seat. He was slumped down, shorter than I expected, or maybe the seat itself was low in respect to the limousine window. Whatever the case, I was struck that morning, one year ago today, by how small and vulnerable George W. Bush looked as he headed to Florida, just as I was struck earlier by how small the building itself had seemed.

The following morning, Sept. 11, 2001, I woke up in a hotel five blocks from the White House, grabbed the remote by the bed to check the morning news. The president was planning to address some Sarasota schoolchildren. Michael Jordan was rumored to be returning to the NBA.

I left the Wyndham, drove a mile north to pick up my friend Ethelbert Miller, a poet and essayist slated to speak that evening at the college where I teach. We headed north on Georgia Avenue about the time two commercial airliners took off from Boston. We left the District and entered rural Maryland around the moment the first plane slammed into the World Trade Center. A third plane hit the Pentagon as we passed Hagerstown. We were just crossing over into Pennsylvania when the last plane was forced to the ground in Shanksville, only about 30 miles from where we were driving.

But we didn’t know any of this.

My car radio was off because Ethelbert and I are both avid followers of world politics, and we were busy talking about the combustible situation in the Middle East. At the time, the whole region was keenly on edge, more unstable than what had become the norm. The number and severity of suicide bombings was beginning to escalate.

Ethelbert had experienced missile attacks in Baghdad some years previously, when he was there as a guest poet during the Iraq-Iran War. He told me just how frightening an experience it was for him. “Americans can’t fully understand what it is to live like that,” he told me. “Americans are not used to bombs.”

We discussed whether the current president’s reluctance to become involved in the Mideast peace process was making matters better or worse. Ethelbert thought worse, and was clearly worried what might come next. “What you have to watch for is a change in the profile of the terrorists,” Ethelbert predicted that morning, as we drove on, the radio still silent. “If the faces of the terrorists change, that will tell you something. If women become suicide bombers, for instance, or if the extent of the terrorism goes beyond where it is now.” He trailed off there, but I knew what he was saying. The White House was playing a dangerous game by staying out of the Israeli-Palestinian fray, and changes in the terrorists’ identity or methods would be a signal that matters were unraveling beyond our control.

Little did we know.

Until we stopped for lunch in a small Greek restaurant, and I began to hear muffled snippets of a newscaster’s voice on the kitchen radio: “Heightened sense of security,” “burning debris,” “the president is in the air, heading for an undisclosed location.” I asked the waitress: “What the hell is going on?” and she was shocked that we hadn’t heard.

The White House, of course, was not hit that day, but it well could have been. It may indeed have been an intended target of the Shanksville plane. Various security officials have suggested as much, though the fact has never been fully confirmed. In any case, the idea is not far-fetched.

And what if the White House had been the target, and what if the brave passengers on Flight 93 had not brought the hijacked jetliner down in a reclaimed strip mine? How much worse could Sept. 11, 2001, have been?

Though I hesitate to suggest that anything could be more painful than the devastation we did witness that nightmare of a Tuesday — I think, on a symbolic level at least, that Americans could have been far more shaken, even more overwhelmed.

The loss of life and property in lower Manhattan was massive almost beyond comprehension, but New York is a place apart from much of America, and it could be argued that this tragedy was less an attack on one nation than an attack on worldwide financial markets. It was the World Trade Center, not the American Trade Center.

While the Pentagon was badly hit, it is a military target, thus less surprising somehow, and it was clear early on that the geometric structure remained largely intact.

At the White House, though, none of this would have been the case. Had the terrorist pilots reached 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and had they aimed with the precision they showed in their other intentional crashes, the building may very well have been leveled. It is, after all, not so large.

And the significance of the strike would have been unmistakable. The White House is two things: the current seat of power, and a rich repository of our nation’s history. Both might have been gone within minutes. It is difficult to imagine another building in our nation the loss of which would mean as much. The structure itself would be rebuilt, of course, but the idea — they can reach us right at our heart — would never go away.

How much worse would we feel? Even more uneasy, I imagine, unsure not just of our safety, our security, but perhaps also less certain of the ability of our government to survive this new century. The ground beneath our feet feels less stable, even today. But a hit on the White House, the destruction of that symbolic home, would have knocked us momentarily to our knees. And we might still be fighting to get back up.

I knew none of this on that Monday that I lingered too long near the famous fence, saw the president leave by limousine, worried about some insane copycat of Frank Corder. I knew none of this at all. But I did sense vulnerability at the White House, a heightened fear. And my friend Ethelbert and I knew the situation in the Middle East was leaving us far more open to danger than we wanted to be.

I am thankful, on this one-year anniversary, that the horrific day was not even more dreadful. I am thankful, very thankful, that our house still stands.

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