I spent that election season hunkered down at a left-wing newsweekly in Chicago, where I learned everything I know about the Democratic Party, and what it needs to do to win elections. It’s not what you think. Even though In These Times was a lefty paper, there was a lot of smart, pragmatic thinking about politics. (You’ll see that “smart” and “pragmatic” don’t modify “the left” very often in my thinking, even though I consider myself part of it.) Those were the years just before and after the Mondale-Reagan election, when optimism battled with despair among lefties. Some folks were still waiting for the uprising that was supposed to begin when Reagan cut social programs, that would move the country toward socialism, but we weren’t. My job was covering emerging Democratic constituencies, mainly women and minorities, as well as promising strategies to boost voter participation and turnout among women, blacks, welfare recipients, students, workers. Covering them critically, but respectfully. Also on staff was John B. Judis, now of the New Republic, to remind me and our readers, critically, respectfully, that none of those efforts would add up to a majority for Democrats anytime soon.

Of course Judis was right. I got sent to San Francisco for the 1984 convention, where I covered the historic Geraldine Ferraro nomination, Mario Cuomo’s and Jesse Jackson’s thrilling speeches, the whole moving cavalcade of liberalism that would tag the party with the epithet that still stings almost 20 years later: “San Francisco Democrats.” And in the end, those Democrats got their butts kicked. I remember Judis being smart about two things in particular: that the so-called gender gap favoring Democrats, which led Mondale to pick the flawed Ferraro as his running mate, had to be at least partly understood as men defecting from the party, not merely women rejecting Republicans; and that the various voter mobilization strategies employed that year would fail to make a difference. The numbers they mobilized just weren’t that great, and they were based on a faulty premise, anyway: that nonvoters represent some vast, untapped Democratic constituency. In fact, polls that year — and every other year I’ve looked at — showed that nonvoters, had they bothered to cast ballots, would have voted much the way the existing electorate did.

Judis had a great one-liner that stayed with me: The Democrats had to give up trying to find “quantitative solutions to qualitative problems” — the quantitative solution being voter-turnout strategies, the quality problem being, well, the Democrats themselves, the candidates and their message that election. Clearly the party was losing voters, not mobilizing them, with what played during the campaign as pessimism, attention to special interests over the national interest, and the lack of a compelling plan for American security in a complex, hostile world. Sound familiar? Yes, lots about the 2002 midterm election was familiar. And just as voters preferred Reagan’s “morning in America” appeal, the clarity of his “evil empire” rhetoric about our enemies, and sunny, lazy optimism about the mounting deficit, which would never, ever require a tax hike, so too did voters this year embrace the tough talk and gleaming platitudes of a smiling cowboy president who was always on the offensive.

This year, though, it was Judis, not I, who was charting the role women, minorities and other underdeveloped constituencies would play in reviving the Democratic Party, in the influential book he co-authored with Ruy Teixeira, “The Emerging Democratic Majority.” Judis and Teixeira called that new majority “McGovern’s revenge,” showing how the groups the liberal South Dakotan opened the party to in 1972 (while he was being trounced by Richard Nixon) would pay him back by electing Democrats 30 years later. They could almost as easily have called it “Mondale’s revenge.” It’s more than just women, minorities and urban voters — the new majority, according to Judis and Teixeira, also includes professionals, a formerly Republican constituency that’s grown, gotten more diverse, and has been turned off by right-wing rhetoric as well as the erosion of their standard of living (Mondale was the first Democrat to make inroads among professionals), and even suburban voters living around what they call “ideopolises,” sprawling intellectual centers from Silicon Valley, Calif., to Madison, Wis., home to a knowledge class that’s edging out the working class in numbers and importance.

So what happened to that Democratic majority in this past election? It’s a testament to Judis and Teixeira’s sobriety and seriousness — they’re widely respected, even by the center-right — that “The Emerging Democratic Majority” didn’t become a derisive punchline, shorthand for Democratic hubris, given the Republican sweep Nov. 5. The Weekly Standard’s David Brooks, the conservative liberals can have over to dinner, even found a way to praise the book while dumping on Democrats in the New York Times last weekend. The fact is, the book didn’t predict an immediate new world order of Democratic dominance. It merely pointed to the building blocks of a Democratic majority — it was the party that was supposed to put it together, and didn’t, this time around. Maybe the book’s title was misleading: Perhaps Democrats thought the majority was going to “emerge” on its own, grab party leaders and march them into power.

Of course, the party had to reach out and grab its majority, and Democrats didn’t do that. Parts of its traditional base — especially black voters, labor and the poor — were never mobilized, and though Democrats kept a slight edge with independent voters and professionals, the advantage wasn’t as strong as it was in 2000, and they lost badly in many suburbs they had won last time around. Even more galling, the GOP went to town with those voter mobilization strategies I was writing about in 1984. Turnout, while still appallingly low, was up slightly this year — from 37.6 percent in 1998 to 39.3 percent of the voting-age population, says the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate — but the increase apparently came from Republican districts. Bush svengali Karl Rove and former Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed made Republicans born-again believers in registration drives and precinct walking and getting out the vote, so on top of their advantages in money and media, Bush’s party had election-day mobilization as well.

Two weeks later, Democrats have mostly blamed one another for the loss, though there’s a line of thinking that insists defeat was inevitable given Bush’s wartime popularity. It’s like 1984 all over again — the left complaining the base wasn’t adequately mobilized, the center warning that a sharp turn left will doom Democrats to irrelevance — without that mocking Kool and the Gang soundtrack (“Celebrate good times, c’mon!”). Can anything be learned from this latest defeat, not to mention all those earlier ones?

One thing is obvious: The party has to work to build a Democratic majority, not simply wait for it to emerge, and it needs both its center and its left to do that. I feel silly stating the obvious, except it’s apparently not self-evident to the two wings of the party, who are still taking daily potshots at one another, most recently over the election of “San Francisco Democrat” Nancy Pelosi as House minority leader. Democrats need a center that’s courageous and inclusive, and a left that wants to be relevant, not merely righteous — and at this moment, it has neither. They still have almost two years to get it together, if they want to build a majority in ’04, but the clock is ticking, loudly.

The 2002 results shocked many Democrats not only because they read the Judis-Teixeira book lazily. They also trusted in the law of midterm elections — that the sitting president’s party always loses House and Senate seats two years into his term. That midterm shift, which has hit every Republican president since Theodore Roosevelt in 1902, and virtually every Democrat since then, has come to seem a law of nature, like gravity; the electorate’s instinctive, self-protective reflex designed to make sure neither party can do too much damage.

But Bush isn’t the first modern president to defy the midterm-election-loss law. In fact, the last guy whose party gained seats in the midterm was the very last president, Bill Clinton. In 1998, he watched Democrats gain ground in a congressional election that was supposed to smite him for Monica Lewinsky, but instead punished his enemies. The GOP recovered from that setback by muzzling some of its attack dogs, purging House Speaker Newt Gingrich and nominating in 2000 an affable Southern governor whose ability to pull its party’s center and right together, to be “a uniter, not a divider,” made him rather like Clinton.

Two consecutive midterm gains by the sitting president’s party does not reverse a century-long trend in the opposite direction. But it does tell us something. Clinton learned from his ’94 midterm loss that he needed to move to the center; in those next years he signed a GOP welfare reform bill and left his worthy but ill-organized healthcare plans in the rearview mirror. Republicans learned the same lesson from their setback four years later, thanks to overreaching by Newt Gingrich, Henry Hyde and Kenneth Starr, and reined in some of their nut-jobs, replacing the polarizing Gingrich with mild-mannered Speaker Dennis Hastert. There’s been no realignment of the American electorate in those years; what’s been realigned are the parties, to meet almost in the middle. It will be a while before the meaning of this midterm is understood, but some lessons already are clear.

One thing defeat will almost certainly teach Democrats is that it’s time for them, at long last, to accept Bush’s presidency. And that’s a good thing. The notion that the smirking GOP scion didn’t win in 2000 (the American people voted for us, damn it!) brought out the worst traits in liberals and the left: self-pity and self-righteousness, the trademark delusional arrogance that the American people really, really want to vote for us, but somebody — the media, the big corporations, Karl Rove, the guys who killed Paul Wellstone — won’t let them. I still believe the Supreme Court’s decision to stop the Florida recount was a partisan outrage and that history will call it that many years from now. If Gore had come out swinging in the first few months afterward, he might have changed the course of Democratic Party history — grabbing a platform to energize the party’s base and critique Bush in that first stumbling year pre-9/11.

But he didn’t. And two years of listening to other Democrats complain about 2000 convinced me it bred passivity and entitlement — a sense that the “emerging Democratic majority” is out there, and we’ll get ‘em next time. Knowing he needed legitimacy, Bush used this election to fight for it, and he won. Democrats who counted on anger from the dastardly 2000 loss buoying the party this year — think clueless Terry McAuliffe, with his macho bluster about taking down Florida Gov. Jeb Bush as payback — lost big.

OK, OK, it’s true; by the numbers the Democrats didn’t lose big. A lot of folks are trying to stave off intraparty mayhem by calmly noting that the Democrats’ losses were small: two Senate seats and five House seats, while they gained three statehouses. Indeed, a shift of roughly 73,000 votes — the GOP’s margin of victory in Missouri and Minnesota — could have saved Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle’s job. And that competitive showing came against a president whose popularity was inflated by the Sept. 11 attacks and the threat of war with Iraq, who traversed the country campaigning for Republicans, staking his presidency on a strong GOP showing, while his party outspent Democrats roughly 3-1.

Yet any liberal who insists the loss was politically unimportant, a mere bump on the road to that “emerging Democratic majority,” should be sentenced to a lifetime as the minority party: living under elderly Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (he’ll only get meaner with age) and Presidents Jeb, George P. and Jenna Bush, with an increasingly demented McAuliffe insisting biannually that this is the year we win Florida. The losses came at a time Democrats rightly expected to gain seats in Congress. Not merely because of the usual midterm bounce, but also because the sputtering economy, along with near-daily corporate scandals, should have worked in the party’s favor, especially given Bush’s own corporate ties, his pro-business, anti-regulatory rhetoric and his reward-the-rich economic program. Not to mention that he didn’t even win the popular vote two years ago. I promise to try never to mention that again, though it will be tough. In this context, it still matters, because Bush didn’t go into the midterm with a lock on the electoral college map, which can help especially with Senate seats, nor with the alpha dog invulnerability of a big winner.

Of course, while some Democrats are trying to minimize the import of their losses, certain Republicans are learning the wrong lesson, too, claiming a mandate for conservatism. As always, the Democrats’ best hope for a comeback is that the GOP misplays its hand, and conservatives are certainly giddy enough to blow it. It’s no longer a deadlocked 50-50 nation, they cry, it’s … 53-47! Compare that to ’84, when Republicans trounced Democrats 58-41. But the GOP’s right wing is restless. “This Republican Congress was elected because of the pro-life vote, and they need to heed that vote,” Family Research Council director Ken Connor told the Washington Post last week; Lott promised to move on a partial-birth abortion bill as soon as he got his job back from Daschle.

Still, Democrats can’t stand around waiting for Republicans to self-destruct. That’s the Terry McAuliffe way, and let’s hope it costs him his job. But even among those lamenting the midterm loss, there are bogus explanations that will, if they become conventional wisdom, set the party back, not forward.

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who should know better, is recycling a litany of tired Democratic complaints from the 1980s to explain why Republicans won this time around. Debating centrist Joe Klein in the pages of Slate, Reich whines that Bush and his friends won because they “have a network of conservative think tanks, a boatload of money to market the ideas that emerge from them, and spokespeople to sell them.” This is what we said under Reagan: Oh, the big bad Heritage Foundation. Oy, the American Enterprise Institute, Cato, Manhattan. We’re losing the battle of ideas! Twenty years and many, many millions of dollars later, the Democrats have think tanks — the Progressive Policy Institute, the Economic Policy Institute, the Institute for America’s Future. They have Web sites, spokespeople, magazines — old standbys like the New Republic and Washington Monthly, newcomers like the DLC’s Blueprint and Reich’s own struggling American Prospect. (Though nobody can argue the Democrats are winning the media battle, not when the Bush administration has its own cable network, Fox News, and its competitors are moving right to compete with it.) But even with all that new intellectual firepower, Democrats are still losing elections they should win.

Reich also disputes the notion that Democrats have to battle Republicans for swing voters in the political center to stage a comeback. In fact, the idea makes him want to “puke,” the plain-talking Reich tells Klein: “Most Americans who are eligible to vote don’t even bother most of the time,” he notes. “The party of non-voters is larger than either Republican or Democrat.”

Ah, there it is again: the comforting fiction that there’s a vast army of nonvoters out there who would vote Democratic if only … if only … Reich isn’t really sure. He’s too smart to call for a sharp turn left, but he’d really like to see … a turn left. Somebody better get Reich a barf bag, because the big prize is, and for the time being will continue to be, independents and swing voters who comprise that contested middle.

Yet centrists let the Democrats down this year, too. Democratic Leadership Council founder Al From warned Nancy Pelosi last week not to drag the party left. “Pelosi, who’s not a part of the New Democrat movement, if she wants to become speaker, will have to lead … the New Democrat way,” From warned darkly in remarks to the Washington Post. “We have not been able to win with the old message of prescription drugs and never touching Social Security.”

That’s certainly true. But honestly, I can’t think of any group more responsible for forcing the Democrats onto the arid terrain of prescription drugs and duelling Social Security plans in this last election than From’s. DLC chair Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana uttered perhaps the most craven words of the campaign season when he told the New York Times Democrats should support Bush’s Iraq plans because polls showed voters thought they were weak on defense: “The majority of the American people tend to trust the Republican Party more on issues involving national security and defense than they do the Democratic Party,” he said. “We need to work to improve our image on that score by taking a more aggressive posture with regard to Iraq, empowering the president.” War as image making; is it any wonder voters told pollsters they didn’t know what the Democrats believe in?

Three things hurt the Democrats badly this past campaign, and they were the result of a dysfunctional interplay between the center and the left. Playing politics, disastrously, with the Iraq vote, sending mixed messages about repealing the regressive Bush tax cut, and finally, when it decided to fight on something, choosing to protect public employee unions from some hurtful provisions of Bush’s homeland security bill. It was a stunning combination of cowardice, failed opportunism and pandering in just a few months.

The Iraq evasion was the most damaging. Democrats appeared to have caved to Bush not to make the world safe for democracy, but to make it safe for Democrats in close races, placing the lives of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians second to the goal of recapturing Congress. In fact, Democrats might have coalesced around a reasonable alternative to the Bush plan: a push to work through the U.N. Security Council, and if U.N. pressure on Saddam failed, to support military force. That’s what most Democrats supported, anyway, and what was ultimately forced on Bush by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and France and Russia. But Democrats got no credit for what could have been a winning position, because they were afraid to take it, afraid it might have made them look soft on Saddam, a little too Carter-Mondale. It was easier to give Bush what he wanted, and rush home to their districts to debate prescription drugs.

And yet, after party leaders decided to go hawkish on Iraq, it made no sense that Democrats couldn’t bend on the civil-service protections in the homeland security bill. It made it look as though their union supporters were more important that the aforementioned soldiers and civilians. Having caved on Iraq, they handed Bush an issue he could use to question their patriotism anyway, and he ran with it. In Georgia, GOP challenger Saxby Chambliss, who avoided military service, knocked off Sen. Max Cleland, a war veteran and triple amputee, for being soft on national security. The Democrats’ vexing political wimpiness helped defeat Cleland, too. Why the incumbent was unable to crush Chambliss for such an awful smear will always baffle me; Terry McAuliffe should have abandoned his futile macho grudge match with Jeb Bush and poured every penny he had into Georgia.

On the tax cut, Democrats got pulled into Bush’s false terms of debate on the issue, and party leaders never found a way out. It was tough to craft one message on it, since some Democrats voted to support the president’s plan. (Note to the left: There’s not a single Senate seat where coming out boldly to repeal the Bush tax cut would have gained the party ground, and there are several, most notably South Dakota, where such a move clearly would have lost a seat.) But it was a mistake for Democrats to get suckered into Bush’s terms of debate in the first place. They should have been gung ho for tax cuts during this recession, but tax cuts for the middle and working classes — payroll tax cuts, tuition tax credits, rebates that would give more disposable income to folks who’d spend it and goose the economy. That was a middle ground that would have been intellectually honest, fiscally responsible and politically smart, and might have postponed the question of repealing the reward-the-rich Bush tax cuts, which take effect later, until later.

But the vise of the tax-cut question speaks to a way New Democrats helped the party in the ’90s but hamstring it now: They helped make the balanced budget central to the Democratic agenda, the one clear victory of the Clinton era, and that’s neither a winning political formula nor a useful economic plan during a recession.

There’s no denying Clinton’s fiscal discipline was crucial to his political success, and a factor behind the economic boom he presided over. It convinced the electorate, and the business community, that Democrats weren’t just about taxing and spending. It kept the government from competing with the private sector to borrow money, and helped create the conditions for the boom of the 1990s. Yet “Rubinomics,” as Republicans now call it derisively, after Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, got more credit than it deserved for the boom years, which had a lot to do with the technology surge and productivity increases that are now history, and won’t be brought back by a pledge to eliminate the deficit. Now it’s Republicans who say the need for a balanced budget is overrated, and Democrats who preach fiscal discipline. But it’s hard to be the party of discipline at a time when discipline only means sacrifice. Between the political damage wreaked by Jimmy Carter’s sweater-wearing lectures on malaise, and Walter Mondale’s tax-hike pledge, Democrats should have learned 20 years ago that sacrifice alone is a pretty unappealing platform for a majority party.

Besides the great gift of a booming economy, Clinton had enormous political advantages Democratic leaders today don’t enjoy. (Pay no attention to the wild ravings of Sally Quinn in the Washington Post, insisting the Democrats’ loss represented a repudiation of Clinton. In a season marked by awful analyses of the Democrats’ defeat, Quinn’s stands out as one of the worst. Clearly, without Clinton to kick around, she has nothing to say.) Clinton saved the party from another generation of irrelevance by pulling together its center and left. He had the personal charisma and the appeal with the Democratic base to convince restive minorities, labor, the poor and their advocates to trust him: that sometime down the road, discipline would lead to investment in the things they cared about: expanded health insurance, child care and education spending, a market-driven set of programs the country has failed to invest in.

But Democrats never got down that road. Thanks in part to the Lewinsky scandal, in part to his own political caution, Clinton never mustered the political capital, or the nerve, to make bold investments that would convince the base that sacrifice led to rewards down the line — the delayed gratification that DLC types like to preach about. He rehabilitated the idea of government, but hardly managed to muster its power on anybody’s behalf (besides laudable but stealthy boosts in the Earned Income Tax Credit and college tuition programs that only wonks knew about). So after eight years of fiscal discipline, there was little payoff — and then, suddenly, there was no Clinton. And here we are.

The DLC wing has yet to yield another politician who can bridge the gap between its left and center, though it has high hopes for North Carolina Sen. John Edwards. Let’s hope Edwards realizes what others in his camp don’t seem to: Sure, it’s conventional wisdom that a lefty platform won’t make the Democrats a majority party, and it’s true — but the wonky, know-it-all, castor-oil DLC appeal can’t do it alone, either. It might have more success with independents, but it loses the left. There’s no emerging majority that way.

Is there any hope for reconciliation? Not if the left listens to bad advice. The Nation thinks its readers should take a page from supporters of conservative Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, who got trounced by Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 presidential election. “He lost huge but gave the GOP the sense of conviction that led to its ascendancy,” the magazine says. That’s a common comforting fantasy, but it’s wrong. The GOP’s ascendancy came from its savvy about how to put together a winning governing coalition, not its ideological purity.

Likewise, lots of lefties point to the Christian right as a model, without understanding what the religious conservative movement is modeling for them. “Republicans have always paid respect to the Christian right with their position on abortion,” Green Party leader Dean Myerson told Salon’s Michelle Goldberg. “We don’t get similar respect from Democrats.” But of course, the Christian right went inside the GOP, while the Green Party abandoned the Democrats. Look at Christian Coalition director Ralph Reed, who turned a group of zealots into a political force to be reckoned with, tied it to the GOP, and then took his energy inside the party, becoming the chair of the Georgia Republicans, who’s now widely credited with that state’s devastating defeats to Democrats. There’s no comparable figure or constituency on the left. If there’s a model for the left’s rehabilitation, it’s not the GOP post-Goldwater but post-Gingrich, when the right learned from its drubbing.

“The Democratic Party needs a left, but it doesn’t need the left,” sighed John Judis, when I called to get his wisdom about this year’s Democratic mess, 18 years after he helped me understand the last Mondale loss. “It doesn’t need the Ramsey Clark crazy people. And the Greens are exactly what isn’t needed. It has to be people who understand American politics — that we have a two-party system and there aren’t three choices — there are two.”

The Democrats’ only post-election move of import — electing Nancy Pelosi House minority leader last Thursday — is being widely hailed as a sign the party did interpret its loss as a signal to turn left, but I think that’s been misunderstood. It’s understandable the GOP would savage Pelosi — calling her a “latte liberal” and reviving the “San Francisco Democrat” slur (which manages to be slyly homophobic), but it’s a little icky to see Democrats do it too. Not only Al From but DLC supporters like Joe Klein piled on last week. A New Republic editorial predicted she’d be a disaster leading a caucus that’s already too far to the left, adding this howler: “Just look at the effect that caucus had on Gephardt, once a pro-life, conservative Democrat.” Blaming liberals for corrupting Gephardt is as fair as blaming altar boys for corrupting wayward priests. C’mon now, guys.

But the Greens don’t like Pelosi either. “There is no real hope among Greens that Pelosi in leadership will mean a significant improvement in Democratic policy,” the party’s steering committee co-chair Ben Manski told Goldberg. That doesn’t hurt Pelosi — she can use the quote to defend herself from Republican smears — but it shows the Greens’ lame political judgment and commitment to political irrelevance.

I have no idea whether Nancy Pelosi will be a great minority leader, but I’d put money on her doing a better job than Gephardt. I expect her to disappoint the left, because that’s her job. Already she picked a conservative as her top deputy, a sign she knows coalition is the only future for the party. Let’s hope critics on her left and right figure that out as well.

Democrats will continue to lose if they don’t build a platform that pulls together their majority. Some elements are clear: They need an aggressive economic program that involves an anti-recession stimulus package; they need to attack the Bush tax cuts less because they’ll lead to deficits than because they give money to folks who don’t need it and won’t spend it. (Typical of their disastrous political maneuvering, the Democrats added the most popular feature of the Bush tax cut — last year’s rebate — but never got credit for it.) They’ve also got to begin to address the unfinished business of the Clinton era, particularly the ever-growing healthcare crisis, which has enormous economic costs. Al Gore’s big plan to back a single-payer plan already has New Democrats sniping, but at least he’s revived a debate.

Much tougher for Democrats, especially the left, will be developing a national security program that’s realistic about the many threats the country faces, but avoids the swaggering unilateralism of the Bush administration. Sadly, in this election Democrats weren’t able to make clear the ways the Bush approach increases the danger the U.S. faces rather than reducing it. But defining a Democratic alternative is going to be a particularly tough process on the left. The peacenik fringe that defends Saddam and other dictators and blames America for 9/11 is probably beyond redemption. But there are healthy and reasonable disagreements about the pros and cons of invading Iraq, whether the U.S. should take a more active role in brokering peace between Israelis and Palestinians, what kind of relations we should have with crucial but flawed regimes like Saudi Arabia, how to approach Pakistan, and so on. There will be debate about these things within the caucus, and between the ’04 candidates, and that’s healthy. But the party needs to acknowledge that its foreign policy and national security agenda is as important as its domestic agenda in the post-Sept. 11 world. Clinton got a break there too — the fall of the Soviet Union took national security off the list of voter concerns for a while — but it’s back.

If these days feel like déjà vu for defeated Democrats, oddly enough history seems to be repeating itself for ascendant Republicans, too. It’s really kind of eerie: There’s a Bush in the White House, a troubled economy, mounting deficits, restive religious zealots and right-wingers, and a Gulf War looming on the horizon too. So even with all of the party’s problems, it’s no time for Democrats to despair. In 2004, they’ll get another shot, maybe a clearer shot, at putting together the Democratic majority that shimmered on the horizon, a mirage, in this election. Let’s hope they’re ready to make the most of the opportunity when it comes.

Additional reporting on this story was done by Laura McClure.

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