Christian conservatives believe they tipped the close Senate elections to the GOP in Georgia, Minnesota and Missouri (though they lost a heated run-off in Louisiana). And Falwell gives much of the credit to fierce campaigning by President Bush, himself a born-again Christian, in the final days before the election. “His work brought out the religious conservative vote, which elected the people we want to have in office,” Falwell says. “No one in the world would deny that the religious conservatives certainly played a major role in regaining Republican control of the Senate. It’s encouraging to think that if we get people out, we can make a difference every time, just like in the election of Ronald Reagan.”

Former President Bill Clinton and other Democrats may blame voters’ preoccupation with terrorism and the impending war with Iraq for their party’s midterm loss, but the Christian fundamentalists weren’t distracted. With messianic zeal, they focused on a plan to control the nation’s political agenda by securing the Senate. Many give credit to political strategist Ralph Reed, the former head of the Christian Coalition who is now chairman of the Georgia Republican Party. Now, as the 108th Congress readies to begin its work, it’s clear that the religious right will press the most conservative agenda in recent American history — and it’s clear, too, that Falwell and other conservatives have faith they will achieve their goals.

The agenda is so controversial that it has created deep divisions even in Bush’s White House. Though such internal dissent is usually hidden, it flared into the open late last year when John DiIulio, a top policy adviser who departed in frustration, ripped the influence of the religious right on Bush. Thus far, however, the president has done little to discourage the troops of the religious right from their radical mission to make the government and judiciary agents for the moral cleansing of America. In their vision, churches would be given government funds to carry out social services. Prayer would be allowed — and encouraged — in public schools. Israel would be backed virtually without question in its conflict with the Palestinians because that would fulfill a prophecy portending the second coming of Christ. Foreign countries would have to pass a moral litmus test to receive U.S. aid.

Clearly, though, the principal aim of hard-line religious conservatives is a tighter control on reproductive options and the enshrinement of the heterosexual nuclear family as the paragon of public virtue. Making abortion illegal is central to that goal.

Their strategy stops short of a direct, immediate assault on the Supreme Court’s historic 1973 decision in Roe vs. Wade that legalized abortion. The Christian right abandoned the idea of an antiabortion constitutional amendment two decades ago, concluding that obtaining approval from a majority of the state legislatures would be too difficult. As of January 2002, a Mellman Group poll found that 62 percent of Americans believe the Supreme Court should continue to rule that abortion is legal everywhere in the United States, rather than let each state have that power.

Instead, the first item on the religious right’s agenda is a ban on late-term abortion; the House of Representatives approved the ban in July. Christian conservatives are counting on the GOP’s slim 51-48 majority in the Senate to pass the ban as well as a number of other measures that, taken together, will impose a more conservative Christian view of morality on the entire nation. Protestant fundamentalists and traditional Catholics want the government to limit sex education, promote abstinence until marriage, downplay the use of condoms to protect against diseases, and curtail the use of birth control pills, which they consider “abortifacients.” (While birth control pills are designed to prevent ovulation, it is believed that sometimes they don’t and that the egg is fertilized but not implanted in the womb.) And social conservatives want to limit U.S. aid for programs in foreign countries that don’t adhere to these standards. Some recent nominees to influential committees and panels even regard sex between a husband and wife with misgiving.

At the same time, the religious right will continue to press for approval of dozens of conservative judicial nominees, whose confirmations were stalled as long as Democrats controlled the Senate. But with the Republican takeover, Democrats effectively conceded that they couldn’t block the nominations anymore when they confirmed Michael McConnell, an abortion critic, to the U.S. Court of Appeals. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, the new chairman of the Judiciary Committee, says he will move quickly to confirm the administration’s choices. And if, as expected, Bush has the chance to name one or two justices to the U.S. Supreme Court, the religious right will then set it sights directly on Roe vs. Wade. “That’s a biggie,” Falwell says. “It won’t be easy, but that’s our goal and we won’t stop until it’s done.”

It’s an old agenda. What’s new is the likelihood that it can be achieved. Not only do Republicans now control the Senate, but Bill Frist, the new majority leader from Tennessee, is also seen as a staunch ally by many conservative Christians. But the issues are enormously volatile, and some analysts warn that the right could precipitate a backlash not just from the American left but from moderates at the center, too. “In some ways, it’s a fiercer debate than we’ve ever had before,” says John Green, director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron in Ohio, who studies the religious right. “We’re getting down to the fundamental choice between individual rights and social order.”

Pro-choice advocates fear religious right-wingers will exploit their new political leverage to redefine women’s reproductive rights so that they conform to core religious beliefs: No sex is allowed before marriage, human life begins at conception, and no one can destroy that life.

“We really have to face up to the fact that one of the key things that these folks want to do is void women’s right to choose, send women back in time, and establish the family that they believe the Bible mandates, which is a male-headed family,” says Marjorie Signer, spokeswoman for the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice in Washington, representing 18 denominations of Christian, Jewish and other religious groups. “We’re not fully engaging the beast and fully and completely understanding what is motivating the religious right. In our analysis, they want to establish a theocracy, a Christian ethos as a political philosophy.”

Even before the GOP regained control of the Senate, Christian conservatives were exerting their influence under the sponsorship of the Bush White House. Since taking office in January 2001, the administration has appointed staunch abortion opponents to positions where they could limit reproductive freedom. Other initiatives are more obscure, but the message is just as clear: In its 2003 budget, which Congress has not yet approved, the administration proposes eliminating the requirement that health insurance plans for federal employees provide coverage for prescription contraceptives.

Bush angered Christian conservatives in August 2001, when he decided not to ban stem-cell research outright. Such research may lead to cures for Alzheimer’s, diabetes, multiple sclerosis and other diseases. Instead, Bush tried to reach a compromise with the scientific community by allowing federally funded research on existing stem-cell cultures, or “lines.” Religious-right groups oppose this stance because microscopic human embryos are destroyed to harvest stem cells, a procedure opponents equate with abortion. Yet even the right is divided on this issue. Nancy Reagan, whose husband, Ronald, suffers from Alzheimer’s, has been quietly lobbying for an overhaul of Bush’s restrictive policy.

But many analysts see Bush’s affront to the religious right as an exception. “Before this election the Bush administration had taken every opportunity to give the extreme right-wing of his party what they’ve wanted on social issues, but they were doing it quietly,” says Gloria Feldt, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “Now they’ll be more out front. I think there will be steamroller in January that will attempt to crush reproductive freedom. We’re talking about sending women back to a time when they were barefoot and pregnant.”

Not surprisingly, most of the policy changes have been made in the Department of Health and Human Services. Under former Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson, a longtime abortion opponent, the department has steadily made policy changes that promote sexual abstinence, reduce access to information about contraception and, most importantly, establish rights for fetuses. The department even removed reports from its Web sites on sex education, the use of condom to protect against AIDS and other diseases, and information undermining suggestions of a link between abortions and breast cancer.

But one of the key strategies of the new conservative Christian campaign is to establish — in policy and legal precedent — that fetuses have rights under the law, separate from the rights of the mother. The initiatives to achieve that goal are often innocent-seeming bureaucratic subtleties that have no more than limited practical impact and so receive little public attention But they appear to be part of a broader plan for an incremental religious revolution.

Last summer, for example, one of the quieter changes that Thompson’s department made was promoting “embryo adoption.” The administration set aside about $1 million for a worthy program that encouraged people who were unable to have children of their own to use embryos left over from fertility procedures. Pro-choice advocates worried that the decision to call the process “adoption” rather than “donation” would be a step toward giving fetuses — or in this case embryos — rights as people. Their concerns were realized soon enough.

In October, Health and Human Services included fetuses under the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, even though that was unnecessary, according to sources in the department. Medicaid covers low-income pregnant women. And if states wanted the insurance program to cover prenatal care, they could have asked for permission. Rhode Island, for example, uses the funds for parents. Pro-choice advocates saw this as another underhanded attempt to attack Roe vs. Wade. The Family Research Council, a conservative Washington-based religious group that believes “God is the author of life, liberty, and the family,” sees it as a simple act of recognizing fetuses’ rights. Pro-choice critics are “obsessed with abortion,” the group said in a news release, and they “simply do not want people to think of the unborn child as a member of the family, even in the context of health care.”

That same month, the department created the Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections, after letting a similar committee dissolve during the summer. The new panel’s charter focuses on how research “specifically” affects humans, with an emphasis on “special populations, such as neonates (premature babies), children, prisoners, the decisionally impaired, pregnant women, embryos and fetuses,” as well as other less defined groups, such as “individuals and populations in international studies.” The department won’t say if the committee’s charter changes the legal status of embryos or fetuses, but conservative religious groups applauded the move as another extension of rights to the unborn.

The administration also appointed religious conservatives to influential, but less visible, positions that are below the public’s radar. Dr. Thomas A. Coburn, a former Republican congressman from Oklahoma, is co-chair of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV and AIDS. While in Congress, Coburn challenged the effectiveness of condom use to prevent AIDS and advocated abstinence. When he left the House, he joined the board of directors of Family Research Council. Washington political observers say Coburn’s name came up for other positions, including Thompson’s job and that of U.S. Surgeon General.

Months later, in October, the administration named Dr. Alma Golden, a former medical director of Strategies for Adolescent Guidance Education Advice Council, an abstinence-advocacy group, as the department’s deputy assistant secretary for population affairs. The Office of Population Affairs oversees Title X, which provides federal funds for family planning and reproductive health services, and Title XX, which funds research and projects on teens’ sexual issues. In Bush’s 2003 fiscal budget, the administration requested a 33 percent increase, or a total of $135 million, for the office’s community-based abstinence-until-marriage programs. As one lobbyist for a women’s health group put it: “It’s the fox guarding the chicken coop.”

Religious right-wing groups can push the administration to name their candidates to key policy positions because they wield considerable power within the GOP. “The Christian right has become closely associated with the Republican party,” says Michael Lienesch, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of “Redeeming America: Piety and Politics in the New Christian Right.” “In many places, it’s difficult to tell one from the other. In the last couple of years, the Christian-right advocates have learned how to work inside the system much better than before. In the ’80s, they were outsiders, knocking on doors trying to get in. Today, they’re in.”

Indeed, in a controversial article in Esquire’s January issue, John DiIulio, the first head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, criticized the Bush administration for accommodating the far-right Republicans’ agenda at the expense of forming more practical social policies. DiIulio is quoted saying that Karl Rove, the president’s senior advisor, asked him to make amends with the evangelical wing of the GOP. “I’m not taking any shit off of Jerry Falwell,” DiIulio reportedly told Rove. “The souls of my dead Italian grandparents are crying out to me, ‘That guy’s not on the side of the angels.’” DiIulio, a professor of politics and religion at the University of Pennsylvania, has since tried to distance himself from his comments in Esquire. DiIulio didn’t return calls to Salon.

As an example of how subtle and yet how ambitious the conservative Christian infiltration has been, none is more telling than the rebirth of the Food and Drug Administration’s reproductive health committee. As an advisory panel it has no direct policymaking power, yet it is influential The last time the full committee met was in 1996, when it recommended the approval of RU-486. (Marketed as Mifepristone, the drug is used to terminate pregnancies during the first nine weeks.) The full panel didn’t even meet to review Viagra. Since its last meeting, all the members’ staggered four-year terms have expired and as a result, the panel became the first FDA advisory committee in almost 20 years whose membership lapsed.

For a year and a half, the Bush administration didn’t fill any vacancies and didn’t renew memberships. Enter Linda Arey Skladany, a former Capitol Hill lobbyist who heads the FDA’s new Office of External Relations. A veteran of the Reagan era and the first Bush administration, Skladany has the power to name all 11 members of the reproductive health committee. And she decided to bring it back to life.

In October, just before the election, word leaked out that one of Skladany’s choices for the panel was Dr. W. David Hager, who may be best known in his home state of Kentucky for organizing a revival for Billy Graham’s son a little more than two years ago. A self-proclaimed pro-lifer, Hager runs a large gynecological practice in Lexington. He doesn’t perform abortions, doesn’t prescribe contraceptives for single patients, won’t prescribe the abortion pill RU-486, won’t insert IUDs, and believes headaches and premenstrual syndrome can be alleviated by reading the Scripture. He’s also against the more conventional birth control pill, which more than 10 million American women use. As the editor of a book that includes the essay “Using the Birth Control Pill Is Ethically Unacceptable,” Hager has said in interviews that he opposes the pill because it is a “convenient way for young people to be sexually active outside of marriage.”

Hager’s nomination sparked a political firestorm. Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, D-N.Y., joined Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., as well as women’s and abortion-rights groups urging the administration not to go ahead with his appointment. “The decision to appoint Dr. Hager is nothing short of irresponsible,” Maloney said in a statement to Salon. “I happen to believe that the head of a women’s health panel should believe in women’s health.

The administration didn’t back down. At the end of December the FDA approved all 11 of Skladany’s nominations, including Hager. While Hager’s name was bandied around as the panel’s chairman, Dr. Linda Guidice, a respected reproductive endocrinologist at Stanford University, will fill that position.

Other members include Michael Green, M.D., an associate professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproduction at Harvard Medical School who has served on the committee in the past; Vivian Lewis, M.D., who teaches reproductive endocrinology at the University of Rochester Medical Center; Valerie Montgomery Rice, M.D., director of the Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility Division and the Women’s Reproductive Center at the University of Kansas Medical Center and an expert in hormone-replacement therapy; George Macones, M.D., an assistant professor of the University of Pennsylvania’s department of obstetrics and gynecology; Scott Emerson, a bio-statistician at the University of Washington; Joseph Stanford, M.D., a professor at the University of Utah’s department of family and preventive medicine; Nancy Dickey, a past president of the American Medical Association; Leslie Gay Bernitsky, M.D., an urologist in Albuquerque, N.M.; and Susan A. Crockett, M.D., a clinical assistant professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and the director of maternal services at Christus Santa Rosa Hospital.

“My sense is that there are clearly people on this committee who are well qualified to serve as advisors to the FDA committee on reproductive health drugs,” says Amy Allison, program director for the National Women’s Health Network, an FDA watchdog group in Washington. “But it’s very disappointing that this administration is putting someone like Dr. Hager on a committee charged with these responsibilities. His work has focused on integrating his personal and religious beliefs into his medical practice … His nomination shows the extreme that the Bush administration is willing to go to in an attempt to restrict women’s right to reproductive health relating to abortion and family planning.”

Allison says the one other panel member that she has reservations about is Stanford, a past president of the American Academy of Natural Family Planning. Stanford, a Mormon, is a proponent of natural family planning, or the rhythm method as it is known in the Catholic Church. He says he doesn’t prescribe contraceptives to his patients. And he strongly believes that women should be informed that birth control pills may not prevent eggs from being fertilized. The FDA, he says, may consider changing labels on the drug to tell women of this risk. Stanford says he’s done research providing evidence that fertilization can occur. “It is not absolutely proven, but it has not been disproven,” he says. “It’s a gray area.”

In an essay excerpted on a University of Notre Dame Web site, Stanford explains his position on contraception: “A husband will sometimes begin to see his wife as an object of sexual pleasure who should always be available for gratification. This tendency is reinforced by the dominant perspective on sexuality in our society, which idealizes unlimited sexual titillation and gratification freed (at least theoretically) from any consideration of pregnancy. Sterilization and hormonal contraceptives especially feed into this prevalent and highly distorted male perspective (which is also adopted by many women).”

Stanford is also against in vitro fertilization because the procedure often creates more embryos than are used. “That’s probably the No. 1 one issue: Embryos are either discarded or used for research,” he told Salon. But he says that as a member of the FDA panel he won’t impose his views on others. “It will be challenging and difficult,” he says. “But in my professional career, I’ve worked with people with different views on ethic issues than I do. There’s no problem if people deal with the issues in an intellectual and honest way.”

At its next meeting, the panel is slated to discuss controversial hormone-replacement therapy for menopausal women. Initially scheduled for Nov. 13, the meeting was postponed until sometime early this year. However, if the committee at some point is asked to review RU-486, the so-called abortion pill, Hager must recuse himself. As a spokesperson for the Christian Medical Association, he wrote a letter last summer to the FDA criticizing its approval of RU-486 in 1996. “It would be hard to look at the petition if you had a hand in writing the petition,” says Brad Stone, an FDA spokesman. “It’s like being the judge and also being the one who is asking for judgment. It’s an awkward situation.” Salon’s calls to Hager’s office weren’t returned.

Religious groups, adamantly opposed to the “abortion pill,” are rallying around Hager. Connie Mackey, Family Research Council’s vice president for government relations and a self-described feminist, says she agrees with Hager’s conclusion that RU-486 is harmful to women and doesn’t think his religious beliefs should disqualify him. His nomination also shows, she says, that Bush “is committed to bringing in people of faith and giving them a shot at working in conditions of influence.”

The Bush administration has even given religious conservatives unofficial — but powerful — positions. John Klink, a former advisor to the Vatican, accompanied an American delegation to a U.N. family-planning conference in Bangkok in December. The State Department says Klink is working in a “voluntary capacity at the behest of the White House,” according to a recent article in the New York Times. Last year, Klink was nominated to head the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration. When it appeared the Democratic Senate would block his confirmation because he opposes contraception and abortion, he withdrew his name. But that didn’t mean he left the political stage.

In Thailand, the U.S. delegation provoked outrage among the other participants when it threatened to withdraw its support for a 1994 agreement reached in Cairo that calls for increasing the legal rights and economic status of women and improving healthcare to control population growth. The U.S. officials contended that phrases in the accord, such as “reproductive health services” and “reproductive rights,” could be construed as promoting abortion. This stance is consistent with Klink’s other work. When he was part of the Holy See’s delegation to population conferences in the 1990s, the Vatican condemned the use of condoms for family-planning purposes or as protection against AIDS and HIV.

At home, restricting abortion was a major issue for social conservatives in the midterm elections. Christian Coalition in America, founded by Pat Robertson, began a voter registration drive the year before, in November 2001. Scorecards graded candidates’ voting records. If they supported, among more mainstream Republican policies, abortion limitations and funding cuts for United Nations population-control programs, politicians received high marks from the coalition. “We believe pro-family influence is alive and well in the U.S.,” says Ronn Torossian, spokesman for the coalition. “We expect both houses to continue that.”

This month, religious right-wingers in Congress will begin to press their domestic antiabortion legislative agenda. First order of business: a ban on late-term abortion. This procedure, medically referred to as a dilation and extraction, or D and X, can be used after the 20th week of pregnancy when the mother’s life is in jeopardy. But more often, studies have shown, it is done simply to end the pregnancy when both the mother and the fetus are in good health. The procedure gets a lot of press, but there is disagreement on how often it is performed. In 1996, the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit focusing on sexual and reproductive health issues, surveyed the 2,000 hospitals, clinics and private practices that performed abortions and found that only 14 performed late-term abortions and that they accounted for 650 such procedures that year. Other studies, however, suggest late-term abortions are much more common.

Assuming Bush signs the late-term abortion ban into law, the religious conservatives will push other bills to erode Roe vs. Wade — all of which have already passed the House. The Unborn Victims Act recognizes unborn children as human victims when they are injured or killed during the commission of federal crimes. The Child Custody Protection Act makes it a federal crime for any person, other than a parent, to knowingly transport a minor across state lines for the purpose of obtaining an abortion if the minor hasn’t complied with state parental-involvement laws.

Then, there’s the Abortion Non-Discrimination Act, which would allow healthcare entities, such as Catholic-affiliated hospitals, to refuse to comply with existing laws and regulations pertaining to abortion services. For example, they might not provide emergency contraception, high dosages of birth control pills given to reduce the chance of pregnancy that are most effective when taken within 72 hours after unprotected sex. Catholics for Free Choice found that only 5 percent of the emergency rooms in Catholic-run hospitals provided such “morning-after pills” on request; only 23 percent provided it for rape victims. “The agenda of the right is absurd,” says Frances Kissling, president of the Catholic group. “If you think abortion is the worst thing you can imagine, then you should support contraception even more.”

Concerned Women for America is lobbying for these bills. Based in Washington, the group helps its more than 500,000 members “bring Biblical principles into all levels of public policy.” Wendy Wright, senior policy director for the organization, says she thinks there are enough antiabortion votes in Congress to pass all the initiatives that would further restrict women’s access to legal abortion. She also says a recent poll done by New York-based Zogby International for the Buffalo News shows that younger people’s support for abortion is decreasing. “Partial-birth abortions show how extreme abortionists have become,” Wright says. “Here’s a baby about to be born and it’s treated in a gruesome manner. This generation of kids have grown up with abortion; they’ve seen the effects on the adult in their lives and on their peers.”

However, Alan D. Crockett, a Zogby spokesman, says that a poll done in mid-November shows that while more Americans oppose access to legal abortions today than 10 years ago, more are also in favor. “It’s still a highly volatile issue,” he says. “But basically, Americans are split right down the middle.”

What American women don’t realize is that the administration has taken significant steps toward taking away their reproductive freedom, says Kate Michelman, president of National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL), a pro-choice group. “The pro-choice movement is rather complacent in the belief that the right to choose is safe. We face the most hostile political environment we’ve ever faced since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973. With the Senate returned to anti-choice leadership hands, there is no barrier to passing legislation that restructures freedom of choice in every conceivable way.”

Not all these bills may become law, and some may be overthrown at a later date, but Bush is making sure that the federal judiciary will carry on his social conservative agenda for years to come. He is expected to have the chance to place one or two justices on the Supreme Court — Justice John Paul Stevens is 82 and Chief Justice William Rehnquist turned 78 in October — and he’s unlikely to commit the sins of his father. Robert Boston, a spokesman for the Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, says Bush the younger won’t nominate a justice like David Souter, whose views on abortion weren’t clear before he landed on the high court. Instead, Boston says, Bush will name someone in the vein of Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas. “He’ll vet the social conservatives and make sure they’re comfortable,” Boston says. “Essentially, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell are going to have veto power.”

If history is a guide, the U.S. Supreme Court may be reluctant to issue a ruling on social policy that could provoke a furious, divisive reaction. And that may be emblematic of the broader risk faced by adherents of the religious right. In a nation already deeply divided over emotional issues that revolve around the separation of church and state, the public may turn angry if it appears they are abusing their political mandate. This happened in 1994 with Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America. Indeed, in Louisiana’s run-off for the U.S. Senate, incumbent Sen. Mary Landrieu’s victory against Suzanne Haik Terrell, one of Bush’s hand-picked candidates and a strong abortion opponent, may indicate there is a limit to how far the religious right can push its agenda. “There may be a backlash among more moderate voters,” says Green at the University of Akron’s Bliss Institute. “Clearly, the religious conservatives have an opportunity, but the margins in the House and Senate are very small, and moderate Republicans may desert and vote with the Democrats.

“I can see why they are so excited, but they may wind up being disappointed,” he adds. “Reagan talked a real good game, but he was a good politician and whatever you may think, he understood that these are very divisive issues. George W. Bush is also a very good politician. But Bush has a heck of a problem: The religious conservatives are a strong constituency and they supported Republicans and they supported him in 2000. He wants them in 2004, but he can’t give them everything they want.”

Even Falwell claims to understand moderation. He knows religious conservatives can’t be too greedy and press for too much, too fast. Falwell has the luxury of patience. He expects his flock to help reelect his ally, George W., in 2004 and then brother Jeb, now the Florida governor, in 2008. “It’s an encouraging time,” Falwell says, “and we must not fumble the ball.”

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