The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth became the latest multimedia incarnation. Launching the most bitter, and perhaps most deliberately misleading Republican-backed campaign attack since the racist Willie Horton ad of 1988, the group, bankrolled by a wealthy Bush donor, aired hollow, secondhand allegations that John Kerry lied about his actions in Vietnam that won five military medals. Not one charge about Kerry’s medals has withstood the slightest scrutiny, but thanks to the inaction of the national press corps, which again appeared in awe of the mighty Republican attack machine and its conservative media echo chamber, the Swift Boat’s dirty trick succeeded in disrupting the presidential campaign for several weeks this summer.

Instead of quickly pointing out that Kerry’s Vietnam accusers were factually challenged and that the coauthors of the anti-Kerry book “Unfit for Command” had severe credibility problems, too many mainstream reporters, editors and producers, taking their cue from Republicans, agreed to abandon serious campaign coverage for weeks in order to focus, yet again, on a so-called character flaw of the Democratic candidate. By the time the Washington Post, New York Times and Los Angeles Times did deploy reporters to knock down the Swift Boat Vets’ rickety charges, they’d taken on a life of their own in the anti-Kerry netherworld of talk radio, right-wing bloggers and Fox News.

The Republicans’ brash maneuver was “highly reminiscent of Nixonian politics,” says John Dean, who served as Nixon’s legal counsel during the Watergate coverup. He notes that 33 years ago John O’Neill, coauthor of “Unfit for Command,” was recruited into politics by one of Nixon’s top dirty tricksters, Chuck Colson.

“We’ve come full circle since Watergate and dirty tricks,” Dean says. “Although today they’re much more nasty.”

The nasty tricks have some Kerry supporters frustrated by the Democrats’ inability to hit back hard — and to take control of the news cycle by doing so. It hasn’t always been this way. Two generations ago a Massachussetts Democrat, John F. Kennedy, beat the dirty-tricks politics of Richard Nixon by playing hardball himself. And in 1992, Bill Clinton defeated a nasty Bush campaign that had eviscerated Michael Dukakis four years earlier by running a tough campaign war room and aggressively fighting the Bush attempts at smears. So far the Kerry campaign hasn’t been able to master the same instinct for the jugular.

“The response to the Swift Boat controversy was not at a level it should have been,” says Paul Alexander, director of “Brothers in Arms,” a new documentary about Kerry’s Vietnam days. “The question should be, what about Bush’s military record? That’s the response. Not that there were 12 bullet holes on the side of Kerry’s boat in Vietnam. The only way to beat Karl Rove and that level of viciousness is to hit back harder. If Democrats don’t understand that … well then, you can finish that sentence.”

Frustration also simmers around the press, and the double standard it seems to have adopted toward the candidates. “Bush has run the most issueless, negative campaign in modern politics,” notes Simon Rosenberg, president of the New Democrat Network. “Yet nothing is written about the fact that a sitting president is offering no agenda for his second term. He should be getting fucking skewered in the press for the kind of campaign he’s running, but there’s nothing. Republicans are held to a different standard.”

Nowhere has that that double standard been more apparent than when contrasting the way the media have covered the two parties’ conventions. Compare the coverage of Bush’s colossal blunder on Monday — telling NBC’s Matt Lauer that he didn’t think the war on terror was winnable — with Teresa Heinz Kerry’s trivial “shove it” remark during the Democratic Convention in Boston last month. So far, Bush’s gaffe has garnered far less coverage than Heinz Kerry’s.

Defining the opponent has always been paramount in campaigns. As Lyndon Johnson once coached candidates, call the other guy an SOB and force him to hold a press conference to deny it. But whereas occasional attacks once punctuated campaigns, today’s modern Republican run for the White House has evolved into nothing but attacks. The variety this year has ranged from the subtle (taking a word or phrase from a Kerry speech out of context to mock the candidate) to the sledgehammer (Swift Boat Veterans for Truth). Never have they been more important, though. Because with a presidential résumé that features a quagmire abroad in Iraq that has cost nearly 1,000 American lives, a net loss of more than 1 million jobs at home, and a job approval struggling to reach 50 percent, defining Kerry and putting him on the defensive may be the only way Bush can salvage a second term.

“Republicans have one strategic imperative, and that is to make Americans more afraid of John Kerry than they are of four more years of George Bush,” says Mike Feldman, a former advisor to Vice President Al Gore.

Over the years hardball-loving Republicans have done a masterful job of painting their opponents with a damning brush, the way the elder Bush easily wiped out a double-digit lead over Dukakis in 1988 by portraying the Massachusetts governor as a weak, out-of-the-mainstream liberal. In 2000, with the help of the press, they turned Gore into a duplicitous exaggerator.

Republicans enjoy an unmatched electronic and digital infrastructure to disseminate their attacks, says Mark Halperin, political director for ABC News. “The advantage the Republicans have is reaching a lot of people through Drudge and Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and well-organized surrogates who are willing to swarm the media with the same message over and over to drive the agenda, with what political professionals would call admirable shamelessness. Democrats do not have the same echo-chamber outlets for an as easy, or as unfiltered, crack at voters.”

“The Republican capacity to create propaganda is much more developed and refined than ours,” Rosenberg says. “Their infrastructure is just massive.” Last spring the Bush-Cheney team launched a $90 million negative ad campaign, the largest TV attack blitz in presidential history. They hoped the onslaught would effectively knock Kerry out of the White House race before it began in earnest. Yet by late August, Kerry held a slight lead in most of the major polls.

Republicans argue that without that avalanche of attacks ads, Kerry might have built up an even larger lead over the summer. And there is some polling data to support that notion. In August, pollster John Zogby’s survey of voters found 47 percent chose Kerry, while 43 chose Bush. Asked separately if Bush deserved a second term, just 43 percent said yes; 53 percent said no. “Those two measurements suggest negative ads are possibly working,” Zogby notes, because “only 47 percent are supporting Kerry” even though 53 percent don’t think Bush deserves reelection.

That’s one reason some Kerry supporters remain anxious about the potential power of the Republican attack machine. “I’d give Republicans an A” in 2004, says one prominent Democratic strategist. “The Bush campaign is more adept than the Kerry campaign at playing the game. The game is, the press only covers four things in a campaign: polls, scandal, mistakes and attacks. And the only one of those you can control are attacks.”

Many Democrats wonder why their party has been so slow to go on the attack. When MoveOn.org tried to counter the Swift Boat smear with a hard-hitting ad pointing to questions about Bush’s own Vietnam-era military service — he’s been unable to document his whereabouts for the last year of his stint in the Texas Air National Guard — Kerry denounced the ad. When Bush refused to do the same with the Swfit Boat ad, Kerry was left alone on the high ground taking fire from his Vietnam critics.

More recently, a video surfaced capturing the former lieutenant governor of Texas admitting to being “ashamed” of his role in getting Bush a safe stateside spot in the National Guard during the height of the Vietnam War. But without Democrat surrogates actively pushing the story to the press, it barely made a media ripple, as most news outlets looked right past the story.

“The Barnes story collided with the mainstream media,” says one Democratic strategist. “It didn’t fall within their narrative” surrounding Kerry’s service. There are indications that Barnes, who has been reticent in the past to discuss his dealings with Bush, may soon have more to say about the topic, which could force the press to cover the story more closely.

For attacks to take hold and sway crucial swing voters, Republican talking points have to spread beyond the conservative media’s Fox News and New York Post echo chamber. Republicans need the help of the mainstream press corps to reiterate their attacks and create a negative narrative that plagues the Democratic candidate. The 2000 campaign proved to be the model as Republicans, with help from an often lazy and dishonest press corps, turned Gore, who for years enjoyed a public image of an overeager Boy Scout, into a liar who’d say anything to get elected. It was the press that gleefully amplified Republican distortions about Gore’s exaggerations, creating urban myths that Gore had bragged about inventing the Internet, being the inspiration for “Love Story,” or discovering the toxic-waste disaster at Love Canal. (To this day, the New York Post still prints that GOP spin as fact.)

“A lot of reporters were charmed by Bush in 2000 and a lot of reporters disdained Al Gore,” says CNN’s Tucker Carlson. “I will never forget traveling with the Gore campaign with a well-known liberal correspondent who exhibited such profound personal contempt for Gore, it just blew me away. And the press coverage totally hurt Gore. They did not cut him a break.”

Alexander, the documentary maker, says not much has changed in four years: “I’ve been on the press plane and I’ve heard what the national press corps says about John Kerry. They don’t like him. It’s reminiscent of the Gore campaign.”

Indeed, the Republican attack blueprint looks an awful like its winning 2000 strategy: Spend months raising doubts about the Democrat’s character and hope the storyline explodes in the fall, the way it engulfed Gore following the presidential debates when he misstated some minor facts and the press pounced, announcing that his performance fit a troubling pattern of embellishments. The problem for Republican attack generals hoping to refight the last war is that the dynamics of 2004 are completely different from those of 2000, which saw a campaign set against the backdrop of peace and prosperity.

“In 2000 there were no major issues driving the election, so the softer stuff mattered more, like which candidate would you rather have a beer with,” says former Gore advisor Feldman, referring to the pundit shorthand that dominated the 2000 campaign analysis: which candidate was more likable? “That’s not where we are in 2004. The issues are war and peace, America’s role in the world, and the future of the economy.”

Tearing Kerry down remains the Republicans’ single best option, and why Swift Boat Veterans for Truth proved so vital. And why the Kerry campaign’s early hesitancy in dealing with the charges proved so costly. “I was surprised the Kerry people didn’t move faster on it,” Dean says. “They kept waiting for somebody else to knock this down.” If the Kerry campaign thought the press would do its job and debunk such an obviously bogus story, it was sadly mistaken.

Coming during the slow news days of August, and playing off raw emotions as well as wild accusations, the Swift Boat story was tailor-made for the 24-hour news channels, which long ago grew tired of providing serious coverage of the war in Iraq. “Cable TV is like the creature in ‘The Predator,’” says the Los Angeles Times’ Ronald Brownstein. “It’s drawn to heat and conflict. It looks for things with the most edge to it.”

Yet at the same time, the press seemed to do its best to gloss over any unsightly edges around the veterans criticizing Kerry in order to sustain their believability. For instance, “Unfit for Command” coauthor O’Neill insisted from the beginning he was acting independently, telling CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, “I’ve had no serious involvement in politics of any kind in over 32 years.” Truth is, over the last 14 years O’Neill made $15,000 worth of political contributions, all if it to Republican candidates and organizations.

Prior to writing “Unfit for Command,” O’Neill’s coauthor, Jerome Corsi, often posted radical commentaries on the right-wing Web site FreeRepublic.com, where he compared Gore and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton to Islamic terrorists, and labeled Kerry as “anti-Christian, anti-American” and his supporters as “communists.” (What are the odds that an anti-Bush book coauthored by someone who spouted off online making fanatical slurs comparing Bush to a terrorist and his supporters to Nazis would ever be taken seriously by CNN?)

Both O’Neill’s blatant misinformation and Corsi’s hateful rhetoric should have been red flags prompting the press to use extreme caution in addressing the Swift Boat charges or giving the Kerry critics an extraordinary amount of free media exposure. Other hoaxlike examples abounded:

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