A lot of people have something important to tell Kerry these days. The candidate Democrats chose because they thought he’d be “electable” is struggling as the presidential race enters the fall stretch. A Gallup poll released Monday shows Kerry trailing George W. Bush 52-45 among likely voters, the first time Bush has had a statistically significant lead over Kerry since the Iowa caucuses. Polls from Time and Newsweek suggest Bush’s lead may be even larger, and everyone from Bill Clinton to Michael Moore is weighing in with advice for the Democratic candidate.

The Kerry campaign is trying to portray a picture of calm: Spokesman David Wade reminded reporters in Ohio over the weekend that the election will be decided by a handful of battleground states and not by “national public-opinion polls.” But that won’t stop the questioning. In a New York Times story Sunday, a half-dozen or so prominent Democrats worried aloud that the Kerry campaign had lost its focus in August and remains stalled now. A phone conversation between Clinton and Kerry on Sunday got big play, as did Clinton’s reported advice: Abandon Vietnam as an issue and focus instead on the U.S. economy. Several former Clinton aides have joined the Kerry staff, prompting the media to crow that Clinton was taking over the campaign from his hospital bed.

Sources inside and outside the campaign say the moves have been Kerry’s, and that they have been more gradual than the media reports have suggested. Former Clinton aides Joe Lockhart and Joel Johnson actually joined the Kerry campaign weeks ago. John Sasso, who was serving as the general manager of the Democratic National Committee and will now travel with Kerry as a top political advisor, has had the candidate’s ear for some time. The New York Times reported Monday that former Clinton stategists James Carville, Paul Begala and Stanley Greenberg will play a “larger role” in the campaign, but it was not immediately clear that their internal roles would be substantial.

A bus tour with the Kerry campaign in Ohio this holiday weekend suggested that some fears about his campaign are unfounded or at least out-of-date. But it also revealed that the Kerry campaign has a long way to go before it becomes the sort of focused, disciplined operation that can beat back Republican attacks and win the White House in November.

Nowhere are the problems — and in some ways, the opportunities — more clear than they are when it comes to Iraq. The war in Iraq remains unpopular, and the deaths of seven Marines in Fallujah Monday will only make it more so. John Edwards has taken to calling the Iraq situation a “mess,” and Kerry said in a statement Monday that the president’s “wrongheaded, go-it-alone Iraq policy has created a quagmire, costing us $200 billion and counting.” But in a presidential race that sometimes seems like a world turned upside down, Kerry has somehow managed to allow Iraq to become a bigger liability for him than it is for Bush: In the Gallup poll, Kerry trails the president by 13 points on the question of which man the voters trust more to handle Iraq.

How could that be? “It isn’t Kerry’s war, it’s Bush’s war,” an incredulous Dennis Kucinich told Salon over the weekend. Kucinich wouldn’t say what advice he had asked Glenn to give Kerry, but he did say what he thought Democrats had to do about Iraq. “This is George Bush’s war, and we’ve got to make sure people know that. There were a number of people in the Senate who voted for the war, a lot of people in the House who voted for the war. But it’s Bush’s war, it’s about accountability, and we’ve got to put that squarely on him.”

It may be Bush’s war, but Bush has made it Kerry’s problem. Kerry still struggles to articulate a clear, concise critique of the war. During the two-day tour through Ohio, Kerry criticized Bush for misleading the country about the reasons for war, for rushing into war, for going to war because he “wanted to,” for ignoring the advice of military leaders about the war, for failing to build a bigger coalition for the war, for forcing out Army Gen. Eric Shinseki after he raised questions about troop levels that would be required for the war, for failing to provide body armor for the troops he sent to war, for misrepresenting the costs of the war, for spending $200 billion on the war when people are suffering back home, and for “opening firehouses in Baghdad” when budget cuts are forcing firehouses to close back in the United States.

“I would not have done just one thing differently than the president on Iraq,” Kerry said at a campaign stop Monday in Pennsylvania. “I would have done everything differently than the president on Iraq.”

Fair enough, but the Republicans have beat Kerry by focusing on one big thing and sticking with it. Virtually every day for the last six months, Bush and Cheney have used the war — their war — as the centerpiece of their attack on Kerry’s credibility and character. And each time they use it — in stump speeches by Bush and Cheney, in convention addresses by their surrogates, in TV ads — they use it exactly the same way with almost exactly the same words. They say that Kerry was for the war and then against the war, and that he voted both for and against funding that was needed to “support our troops.”

“My opponent and I have different approaches,” Bush said in his convention speech last week. “I proposed, and the Congress overwhelmingly passed, $87 billion in funding needed by our troops doing battle in Afghanistan and Iraq. My opponent and his running mate voted against this money for bullets, and fuel, and vehicles, and body armor. When asked to explain his vote, the senator said, ‘I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.’ Then he said he was ‘proud’ of that vote. Then, when pressed, he said it was a ‘complicated’ matter. There’s nothing complicated about supporting our troops in Congress.”

Delegates booed and chanted “flip-flop,” and the notion that Kerry has vacillated arbitrarily on the war was planted even deeper in voters’ minds. The perception isn’t accurate, of course. When Kerry voted for the use-of-force authorization in October 2002, he raised many of the same concerns that he raises now. And his for and against votes on the $87 billion were, in fact, votes on two different measures: one that would have paid for the war by repealing Bush’s tax cuts for those making more than $400,000 a year, and one that simply added the costs to an already exploding federal debt.

Those votes might actually appeal to voters concerned about the budget deficit, but all they’ve heard about them is the flip-flop charge. As Kerry spoke to voters Friday on the front lawn of a home in Newark, Ohio, Mike Fox stood across the street, holding up a Bush-Cheney campaign sign. Fox, who owns a lock and security business and served as a city councilman in a nearby town, said he’d have no objection to raising taxes to pay for the war. “I’m in favor of supporting the troops in whatever way it takes,” he said. “If it takes calling Mike Fox, who is not a rich American, and asking for more money, they’ve got it.” When told that Kerry had supported such a measure, Fox seemed perplexed and changed the subject.

Back at the campaign event, John Glenn was complaining that Republicans were engaged in “the old Hitler business — if you hear something repeated, repeated, repeated, repeated, you start to believe it.” Glenn said voters should “separate out fact from fiction,” but many of them lack the information they’d need to do so. The Republicans have no interest in explaining Kerry’s votes to them — at the Republican Convention in New York, Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander defended the use of the “flip-flop” label but then told Salon that he didn’t “know the details” of the two votes on the $87 billion — and Kerry either can’t or won’t explain them himself. At the Newark event, a supporter all but begged Kerry to state clearly that the vote against the $87 billion was actually a vote for fiscal responsibility. Kerry didn’t. At the next stop on the campaign trail, an aide grumbled: “I don’t know why he can’t take the extra 30 seconds to explain himself.”

It’s not like the candidate feels pressed for time. At stop after stop in Ohio, campaign events had an undisciplined, almost leisurely, feel. The Newark event stretched on for more than an hour, even though there were — by design — fewer than 100 people there. The next day in Akron, Kerry spoke for more than 45 minutes, an eternity at an outdoor rally on a hot and humid summer day.

The Akron speech was rambling and unfocused, as were most of Kerry’s speeches during the Ohio swing. He opened each speech with a long pander to the local folks, invariably invoking the names of the local high school football teams and a reference to some local eatery where he’d “heard” that they make the best whatever — pizza, hamburgers, meatball sandwiches — for miles around. The rest of the speech was a grab bag, and Kerry filled it with different bits at each stop. He revisited applause lines from old speeches and tested some new ones, and along the way he interrupted himself often with asides, explanations and tangents that made the speeches hard to follow.

For all the talk of Bush’s malaprops, the man can sometimes make a simple point clearly. Untroubled by nuance, detail or fact, Bush travels the country saying things like, “Because we acted, our economy is growing.” That’s not how Kerry speaks on the stump. Here’s the candidate in Akron Saturday, trying to go after Bush on what should be easy targets, Friday’s announcements of disappointing job numbers and the biggest increase ever in Medicare premiums:

“What makes me angry — and I say this nicely — what makes me angry is the complete breach of faith with the American people. They promised four years ago to strengthen Medicare. He promised again a couple of nights ago to strengthen Medicare. And you wake up Friday morning on a day when a lot of the news is being hidden by what’s happening in the hurricane down in Florida, what’s happening in Russia with 200 people tragically killed by terror, and the news is hidden, but it isn’t going to be hidden for long from Americans. Because what they did yesterday was, this president of the United States, made history twice.”

Four hundred words later, Kerry was still going at it. He eventually mentioned the job numbers and the Medicare increase, but along the way he detoured with references to Herbert Hoover, the Great Depression, Halliburton, Ken Lay, tax cuts and prescription drugs from Canada. Kucinich said Saturday night in Steubenville that Kerry was “finding his voice” on economic issues, but he still seemed to need a map.

Donna Brazile, who ran Al Gore’s campaign in 2000, told Salon Monday that Kerry’s advisors need to get him on a clear, consistent message and keep him there. “The message gurus need to sit back and say, ‘Take all of this other verbiage out of your vocabulary and just say these three things every day, even if it sounds boring, just say it, say it, and keep saying it.’”

Kerry can deliver a strong speech. His convention performance was long but on target, and he was sharp Thursday night in Springfield, Ohio, when he finally fired back at Bush and Cheney for the Swift boat smears. Monday morning in West Virginia, the campaign made a stab at cohesiveness — a too-cute-by-half speech built around the theme that “W” stands for “wrong.” According to an advance text of the speech released by the campaign, Kerry said: “On every issue, from Iraq to healthcare, from jobs to education, W stands for wrong. Wrong choices. Wrong direction. It’s time for a president who will lead America in a new direction.”

The speech presented a new way to package the themes Kerry had been working toward all weekend. After going right at Bush and Cheney on Vietnam Friday night, Kerry moved farther away from the 35-year-old war — and closer to the state of the U.S. economy today — with each stop on the campaign trail. He used Iraq as a way in: Just as Bush misled the country about the war, Kerry said, he misled the country about the effect his tax cuts would have on job creation. By the time Kerry arrived in Steubenville Saturday night, Vietnam was all but gone from his speech. “I really don’t want this race to be brought down to a place that’s personal,” Kerry said. Charging that Republicans wanted to make the race a referendum on what “might or might not have happened 35 years ago,” Kerry said he doesn’t “worry about those attacks.”

It’s still unclear just how aggressive the campaign will get. Pseudo-Democrat Susan Estrich has called on Kerry supporters to do the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth one better by founding “the Dead Texans for Truth, highlighting those who served in Vietnam instead of the privileged draft-dodging president, and ended up as names on the wall instead of members of the Air National Guard.”

But Kerry’s comments on the campaign trail suggest that he’d be uncomfortable going even half that far. When Kerry said that he didn’t want the race to get “personal” Saturday night, he appeared to be distancing himself from some of the local partisans who had introduced him earlier in the day. One said that Bush had been “absent without leave” during his stint in the National Guard; another said Bush was “carrying out his responsibilities as a cheerleader at Yale” while Kerry was “carrying a gun” in Vietnam; a third said Bush was “hiding in the woods in Alabama” when he should have been serving his country. Kerry seemed uncomfortable with the tone of the attacks, and in Steubenville he backed away from them.

It wasn’t the first time that Kerry seemed a step behind his supporters. At the Akron rally, a woman in the crowd shouted out that George W. Bush hates senior citizens. Kerry could have ignored her but took it upon himself to disavow the comment. “I hope that president doesn’t hate anybody,” he said, “and I hope we don’t have hate in America.” At a skeet-shooting photo op on a farm in Edinburg, Ohio, a supporter suggested painting the face of turncoat Sen. Zell Miller on one of the clay pigeons. Kerry laughed but said, “Well, I don’t know about that.”

It’s hard to square Kerry’s caution with the tough talk coming out of his campaign. As Kerry was speaking in Steubenville, his traveling press spokesman, David Wade, was telling Salon that the campaign will be hitting the Republicans hard every day between now and November. “We want to crush these guys,” Wade said. “They made an enormous mistake questioning the heart and the patriotism of John Kerry, and they’ll pay for it for the rest of their lives.”

Wade said the campaign will take what he called the “Sean Connery approach” to future attacks from the right. It was a reference to the advice Connery’s character in “The Untouchables” gave about beating Al Capone: “If they pull out a knife, we’ll pull out a gun,” Wade said. “We will always be on the offense, every day.”

There were signs of new aggressiveness Sunday, as the Kerry campaign picked up and pushed news that retiring Florida Sen. Bob Graham will, in an upcoming book, charge that the Bush administration interfered with an investigation into Saudi links to the attacks of Sept. 11. News of Graham’s allegations broke Sunday, and the campaign was out with a statement almost immediately. The Democrats also moved quickly on a new report indicating that additional documents seem to be missing from Bush’s military file, distributing a statement in which DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe said Bush “has some explaining to do.”

There may be more of the same in the days ahead as the mainstream media looks closer at Bush’s military record and personal past. On Wednesday night, Ben Barnes is set to elaborate on his story of being “ashamed” he helped Bush get into the Texas Air National Guard, ahead of young men without family ties, on “60 Minutes II.” Kitty Kelley’s unauthorized biography of the Bush family comes out Sept. 14, and the blogs and tabloids are already salivating over the salacious details it may reveal.

Brazile said Kerry is right to go on the offensive, but that he’s got to be careful when he does it. “It has to be a precision hit,” she said, because Bush is the president and because large numbers of Americans bonded with him the moment those planes hit the twin towers. Brazile offered the beginnings of one theme that could work: “On Sept. 11, he led us. On Sept. 12, he misled us.”

Brazile said Kerry has plenty of time to turn the race around, but that he has got to start soon. The Kerry campaign stresses the candidate’s reputation as a closer: He pulled victory from defeat in Iowa in the primaries, and he came from behind to beat Bill Weld in the Massachusetts race. When the going gets tough enough, his aides and supporters say, Kerry will find within himself all of the intensity he needs. As the Ohio trip ended, Kucinich said that Democrats have “got the issues with them, and I think we’ve got the guy who can deliver now.” The key: Kerry has to do it. “He has to,” Kucinich said. “He has to.” An aide agreed. A majority of Americans believe that it’s time for a change in the White House, the aide said, “But John Kerry himself has to close the deal.”

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