In Spokane that day might be soon. Activists have embarked on a radical plan to create a gay business district in the heart of the city. It is a controversial idea in a region known mainly for political conservatism and the growing presence of evangelical Christians. But the idea’s backers are determined. “Bring it on. Spokane won’t change without confrontation,” said Bonnie Aspen, a gay businesswoman and one of the scheme’s architects.

Such an upfront move is part of a wider national response by gay groups in America in the wake of an election in which gay issues, such as same-sex marriage, came to the fore. In an effort to maximize turnout among conservative and evangelical voters, ballots on same-sex marriage were held in 11 states during last November’s election. All voted against them.

Gay groups say they have been demonized by a Republican administration beholden to a powerful evangelical wing that believes homosexuality is a sin. But rather than battening down the hatches, they have decided to launch a fresh push on a broad front of issues. Last month 22 gay organizations for the first time signed a joint list of priorities ranging from gay marriage to jobs law and the rights of gays in the military. Opponents of gay rights have mobilized too. Strengthened by their new political power, a battery of conservative organizations is pushing forward. An additional 15 states are expected to have gay marriage ballots soon. Some conservative groups, such as Focus on the Family, meet weekly to plan strategy to fight a “homosexual agenda.”

Since the election both sides have won victories. Conservatives have savored a Supreme Court decision that declined to hear a Florida case challenging a ban on gay adoption. Gay rights groups recently saw victories in California and Montana on same-sex-partner benefits rights.

The divisions of the “culture wars” are as wide as ever, and nowhere more than in towns like Spokane. The city of more than 200,000 people lies in the “blue state” of Washington, but that is skewed by heavy Democratic voting in Seattle. In fact, Spokane and the entire east of Washington state is part of a broad sweep of rural “red America” in the Northwest that includes Idaho and Montana and is a Republican stronghold. It is an area of rugged mountains and farms, famed for militia groups. The white power Aryan Nations group chose to make its headquarters just a few miles from Spokane, over the Idaho border.

The area has also seen an explosive growth in evangelical churches. Several large ministries have their headquarters in the region, and many condemn homosexuality as evil and against the Bible. For members of Spokane’s gay community that atmosphere can be intimidating. “I walked right back into the closet when I came here,” said Marvin Reguindin, a local graphic designer who is also organizing the gay business district plan.

The plan to create the district has sparked controversy even among gay groups. Critics have wondered at the possibility of creating a gay area from scratch when other famous gay districts — such as Chelsea in New York and Castro in San Francisco — have grown naturally.

But the main opposition comes from conservatives and evangelicals. One Spokane church leader, Walton Mize, bishop of the Christ Holy Sanctified Church, has warned of an “underbelly” of gay culture that will attract sexual predators and be a risk to children. Other evangelical groups have distributed antigay literature to city officials claiming that gays will bring disease and mental illnesses into Spokane. Penny Lancaster, leader of an influential body of evangelical groups called Community Impact Spokane, has said the city risks becoming a “gay Mecca.”

So far city officials have maintained silence on the idea, which has come entirely from the private sector and does not involve any money from local authorities. But Spokane’s gay groups are not backing down. “We need to be visible. It gives validation to who we are,” said Reguindin. They are already deep in talks with several developers and have chosen their target area in the city. But they have not revealed its location, fearing opposition groups will buy property there to drive up prices and sink the project.

Being in small-town America is hard. Spokane was recently gripped by a furor after the local school board canceled a gay high school dance just 24 hours before it was due to start. Officials said the move was made because of “security concerns,” though two police officers had been hired for the annual Valentine’s Day event. They also said its 14-22 age range was against school policy, even though the dance had been held with those ages for the past two years. “It was just done because it was us gay kids,” said Adam Cogswell, 21. “Everyone knows that.”

Last week, in an impassioned meeting before the school board, members of Odyssey gave a searing account of how hard it was to be gay and go to school in Spokane. “A lot of these kids are walking through the halls in these schools fearing for their own safety,” said a young girl called Danielle. Many gay teens wish to leave Spokane for big cities like Seattle, San Francisco or New York with long-established gay areas.

However, proponents of the gay district in Spokane hope it would change things as well as challenge antigay prejudice in conservative areas. Cogswell said: “We need to move all the gays to the middle of the country to show them we are people too.”

The gay-district planners want their idea to act as a model to smaller towns. “If we can do it in Spokane, we can do it anywhere,” Aspen said. But they admit that being openly gay in many parts of America is an exercise in fear. “We live in fear every day. That is part of being gay right now,” said Reguindin.

There are also some victories. For 90 minutes school board members were lambasted by students, parents and teachers for canceling the gay dance. At the end a board spokeswoman apologized, admitting that the cancellation was an unfortunate mistake. “It will never happen again.”

Balwa reflects the sharp divisions in Iraq in the run-up to an election for which 12.5 million people are registered to vote. He reflects on an Iraq divided between those who will vote and those, either through fear or rejection of the process, will stay at home.

He reflects, too, on an Iraq divided between the minority Sunni Muslims, who dominated the Iraq of Saddam Hussein for decades, and southern Shiites and northern Kurds. The latter comprise the 80 percent of the population who were persecuted under Saddam’s rule, while the Sunni minority of just 20 percent dominated all areas of Iraqi life, the ruling Baath Party in particular.

It is the lethal tension between these two groups that will define whether the next 12 months of the political process, which the elections will kick-start, will mark the beginning of the end of Iraq’s violence or the start of the country’s breakup and descent into civil war. The elections will not just be critical for Iraqis. For countries such as Britain and the U.S., whose increasingly war-weary populations are supplying the bulk of foreign troops in Iraq, the elections threaten to have a lasting impact, dictating when those soldiers can finally come home.

Evidence on which path Iraq might follow has for months been pored over by politicians, diplomats, academics and intelligence officials. If one thing is certain, it is that this month’s elections will mark the moment of ascendancy of the majority Shiites, who make up 60 percent or more of the country’s population — and of Sunni defeat. What is also certain is that the weeks leading up to the announcement of the results in mid-February will be bloody.

These are twin issues that are highlighted by Mike Rubin, a former political advisor to the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq: I expect there to be a great deal of violence, especially in the two or three days before the election itself.

He describes the conundrum at the heart of the Sunni abstention and Sunni violence. The Sunni leaders, he explains, are not afraid that the election will not represent them. They are afraid that it will represent them. They are afraid of coming to terms with their minority status. While their minority status will be confirmed whether Sunnis vote or not, all they can hope is that by abstaining in large numbers, and blaming the violent disruption caused by their own community for being unable to participate, somehow they can rob the poll of its legitimacy.

What is clear is that despite the spiraling violence aimed at disrupting the elections, vast numbers of Iraqis will vote on Jan. 30. Polls conducted over the past few months in Iraq — while uncertain in other respects — have indicated that 80 percent of the electorate intends to vote, a figure that would suggest turnouts for Shiites and Kurds in the ninth percentile and a Sunni vote likely to be desperately low. Given the campaign of abstention and intimidation in the Sunni heartland, that makes the likely results not difficult to fathom: a massive victory for lists dominated by Shiites way beyond the 60 percent that they represent in the population. That high turnout is being encouraged by a religious decree issued by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani calling on all Shiites to vote.

But for some the likely scale of a victory for Shiite candidates as a result of a Sunni boycott is as much a cause for concern as the boycott itself. Among those afraid of the impact of a widespread Sunni abstention is Iraq’s interior minister, Falah al-Naqib.

Boycotting means betrayal and the sparking of civil war, he said last week. If the National Assembly does not represent all Iraqis, we will enter civil war. It is precisely this that has driven one of Iraq’s most influential Shiite parties, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), to appeal last week to reluctant Sunnis to vote. Most Sunnis, however, seem unlikely to listen, a situation that has deteriorated markedly from even two months ago, when the main Sunni political party, the Iraqi Islamic Party, entered a list of 275 candidates.

After failing to win agreement for a six-month delay of the vote because of the violence, the party eventually withdrew. While it remains on the ballot, its candidates have promised not to take up their seats. With a self-justifying logic, Ayad al-Samarrai, a senior official in the party, said he believed a delay would at least have helped reduce the violence. If there are 80 percent of our supporters who can’t vote now, that would be down to 20 percent who couldn’t vote, he said, ignoring the fact that it is precisely the fact of Sunni militants seeking to disrupt the elections that is behind the low Sunni participation. It is a reality not likely to be transformed by a six-month delay.

But whether the election’s backers in London and Washington like it or not — and no matter how hard they try to persuade the world to focus on the political process and not the violence — it is precisely the fear of civil war and division that hangs over not just the poll but its aftermath as well. A single question dominates: whether the insurgency will continue to grow in parallel to the rolling out of the political process that will lead to a referendum on a new constitution planned for October, or whether these elections will be the high-water mark of the violence. It is the latter that Washington and London are counting on.

And the social complexity of the insurgency has led some to abandon attempts to put a numerical value on the scale of the resistance, which at least one Iraqi minister has claimed recently to be 200,000 strong, to evaluate whether even now it is still growing, and to conceive of it in terms of its potential to influence instead.

It is very difficult to define what membership of the insurgency entails, says one Whitehall source. If you let your cousin hide in your house because he is an insurgent, does that mean you are an insurgent too? The crucial question is whether its influence is continuing to expand. At the moment the insurgency still lacks any coherent political agenda. We still see it as operating largely in local networks, and it has yet to show any signs of achieving any consensus across the sectarian divide.

This inability to join forces with Shiites in a joint resistance, says the official, exists despite the fact that all parties, Shiites included, say they want foreign troops to leave. But if officials hope that this may mark the limit of the uprising, what is also evident is that despite the siege of Fallujah and continuing operations across the Sunni triangle and elsewhere, the resistance — in physical terms at least — still appears not to have lost its momentum.

While it is inevitable that the violence will accelerate in the days ahead, the insurgents, foreign governments and Iraqis themselves recognize that it is the political settlement reached after the elections that is crucial to whether Iraq can avoid a wider bloodshed.

A Shiite-dominated National Assembly of 275 members will be asked to select a president and two vice presidents, who will then choose a prime minister and nominate a cabinet. That cabinet will be referred back to the assembly for approval. Already some are predicting that the allocation of ministerial portfolios may be a source of its own tension as individuals and parties struggle for powerful ministries.

Former U.S. political advisor Rubin is one of those who see the potential for tension over who controls the powerful Interior Ministry and, beyond that, a clash of authority with American military authorities. It is a fight, Rubin believes, that the Shiites will win, with the Kurds getting the presidency and the Sunnis, perhaps, the Foreign Ministry.

Even more critical, however, will be the struggle to write Iraq’s new Constitution, scheduled to be put to a referendum in October, a referendum that can be blocked if it is rejected by three provinces, a point in Iraq’s interim law already deeply unpopular with Shiites, who fear that Kurds and Sunnis could use it to block articles that enjoy majority support, in particular over the sensitive area of the role of religion in the state.

It is precisely for these reasons that both U.S. and U.K. officials are convinced that even if there is a widespread Sunni boycott, some mechanism must be incorporated by a Shiite-dominated Iraqi assembly and government to ensure proper Sunni representation of some kind.

Among those who have articulated this in recent days is been John Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, who said last week that it was important for Iraq’s new political leaders to be as inclusive as possible in government even if the Sunnis underperform in the vote. It is a call that was reiterated on Friday by the present justice minister, Malek Dohan al-Hasan, a Shiite who warned his co-religionists to protect minority rights, especially those of Sunnis staying away from the polls.

He touched on an already controversial issue that many fear will be exacerbated if a Shiite landslide is returned in the absence of Sunni voters: that Shiite parties must refrain from staffing the government only with their followers, a trend already apparent in the interim government.

Elections are now certain, Hasan, who heads a secular list contesting the election, told Reuters. But I ask the Shiites to look around them. You are in an Arab Sunni region. Who will come to your aid if you monopolize power? Look at the example of Saddam and what happens when political power is not used for the common good.

The Sunni groups — and I truly despise using this term because Iraq is truly a mixed nation — have not been frank either. Their argument about the illegitimacy of elections under occupation does not hold. Look at Japan and Germany after the Second World War, he added.

This issue is also bothering some Western officials, who admit that no matter how successful Election Day turns out to be in the numbers voting, a great deal is being asked of Iraqis about how they exercise their sovereignty. The parallel is with the Russian economy, said one British official. Everyone had high hopes when they had got rid of Soviet statism, but did not expect the chaotic and erratic results. We are asking an awful lot of the Iraqi people, who have no experience of a fully participatory democratic system, and who do not enjoy even the minimum levels of political trust.

We would have been OK if the Iraqi middle class had still been intact, but it had a huge hole blown in it in the past 14 years between the first and second Gulf wars. The people who might have been the motor of change were disempowered. Politically, Iraq is a damaged child. Its problems are long term.

Dover has been catapulted into the center of a renewed battle over the teaching of evolution in schools. The religious right, emboldened by its spreading influence in the Republican Party and an explosive growth in the number of evangelical Christians, has launched a major push to get an alternative to evolution — which they believe denies the biblical version of God’s creation of the world — into the classroom. At least 40 U.S. states have faced legal challenges in recent months.

At the forefront of the challenge is the concept of “intelligent design,” which stipulates that the universe is so complex it shows clear evidence of a “designer.” Advocates say evolution is just another theory, not a scientific fact. Critics, however, say intelligent design is bringing religion into science. “It is just creationism-lite,” said Nick Matzke, a spokesman for the National Center for Science Education.

The move in Dover was led by William Buckingham, a born-again Christian. The decision has split the community and dominates conversation in diners, bars and churches. The Browns say Buckingham and a group of evangelical Christians have hijacked the school board and imposed their views on a community in which creationism in the classroom had never been an issue. “They are on a crusade,” Brown said. His wife added: “Dover is just ahead of the curve. There will be a lot more things like this in other places.”

In fact, Dover is already just part of a growing phenomenon. In Cobb County, Ga., textbooks have had stickers stuck inside them telling children that evolution is “theory, not fact.” In Grantsburg, Wis., new rules direct teachers to analyze the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolution, as well as allow for the study of other theories. In Ohio the state school board has sought to open the way for the teaching of opposing theories to evolution. The Missouri Legislature will consider the introduction of intelligent design into its classrooms last year.

Arguments over evolution — which has long been accepted as fact by the vast majority of scientists — arouse deep passions in America. Almost 80 years after the Scopes “monkey trial,” in which Edward Scopes was tried and convicted for teaching evolution in Tennessee, many Americans still do not believe in it. A Gallup Poll last month showed that 45 percent believe God created humans in their present form within the past 10,000 years.

Now both sides are preparing to take the issue to the Supreme Court for the first time since the ’80s. A conservative law firm, the Thomas More Law Center, has offered to represent the Dover school board members. Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union is looking for Dover complainants to take the case on from a pro-evolution view. Conservatives are confident that they will prevail. “We are going to win. It is a free-speech right for students to receive alternative views,” said Richard Thompson, president of the law center.

Thompson says intelligent design does not by its nature advocate a religious point of view, which would be against the U.S. Constitution. “It is based on science that shows the world is so complex it could not have happened by accident,” he said. Critics contend the very concept of a “designer” implies a god.

Religious groups have been galvanized by the reelection of President Bush, a born-again Christian who has stated: “On the issue of evolution, the verdict is still out on how God created the Earth.”

Christians are being encouraged to join school boards and lobby to get intelligent design in the curriculum. “We have as much right as the evolutionists to be on our school boards,” said Patricia Nason, of the Institute for Creation Research. She and fellow creationists believe Bush’s victory gave them a chance to get their agenda into schools. “I feel that if we don’t make progress in the next four years that window of opportunity will close,” she said.

The move adds to a growing list of dissatisfactions expressed by current and former members of the military over U.S. handling of the Iraq war. They have ranged from widespread criticism over insufficient troop levels to equipment shortages and failures.

The stop-loss policy was introduced last spring for all U.S. soldiers posted to Iraq or Afghanistan. It means that soldiers whose period of enlistment ends while they are on active duty cannot go home until their entire unit reaches the end of its period of service. That could mean many weeks of additional service for individual soldiers whose enlistments end earlier than those of their comrades.

The U.S. Army says the policy is needed to maintain cohesion and avoid problems of continually integrating new men and women into units at war. However, critics have said that the Army is using the policy as a way of maintaining manpower levels at a time when the military is facing a recruiting squeeze. In recent months more than 7,000 soldiers have been affected by the policy.

The soldiers’ suit against the Army claims that the stop-loss policy is a breach of contract. “This is a matter of fairness. My job was to go over and perform my duties under the contract I signed … Now I believe that they should honor their end of the contract,” one of the soldiers, David Qualls, told the New York Times. Qualls, the only one of the group not listed on court papers as “John Doe,” said he was not against the war. But the soldiers’ case, which has been filed in a court in Washington, has been taken up by several groups connected to the antiwar movement.

The soldiers have been given legal help from the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, which has launched several cases challenging the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay. Some relatives of the soldiers have also been given advice and encouragement by Military Families Speak Out, a lobbying group of relatives formed to oppose the war. “This lawsuit addresses an injustice that is keeping soldiers fighting and dying after they have completed their side of their contract with the Army,” said Nancy Lessin, cofounder of MFSO.

The eight soldiers in the lawsuit come from a variety of backgrounds. They include an Army musician, a transportation specialist and a National Guardsman. Qualls, who is due back in Iraq this weekend, is a radio operator. He signed up for one year in the Arkansas National Guard in 2003, but he said that he now expects to be in Iraq until sometime next year. “You’ve got thousands of people over there in the same situation as me and somebody’s got to do something. Why not have it be me?” he said.

That last phrase echoed the words the pope used about Mel Gibson’s blockbuster film “The Passion of the Christ.” It showed how easily religious mannerisms fall from Bush’s lips and how central his faith is to his view of politics. A few hours later, however, the real voting tallies were showing the first signs of Bush’s victory. It was clear the religious right was in fact turning out in droves for the man whose faith matched its own. It was what it was. The Republicans had won.

Many in America now believe there has been a revolution in American politics. At a time of war in Iraq and the first net loss of jobs since the Great Depression, it was instead the issue of cultural values that decided the greatest number of votes. For Kerry’s campaign, which saw the Iraq war and the economy as the deciding factors, it was a huge slap in the face.

“The turnout of the religious right was key to Bush’s victory. The new slogan should be: ‘It’s the culture, stupid,’” said Mark Rozell, politics professor at George Mason University in Virginia.

There has been a new dawn in America’s politics, and it is shining on a political landscape shaped not by war or jobs or healthcare but by the role of faith in government and so-called cultural values related to abortion and gay marriage. It is this landscape, many believe, that will shape the United States in the next four years.

Rove knows that. It was Rove, the political guru who has masterminded Bush’s rise to power, who hit upon the winning strategy of 2004. As soon as the knife-edged election of 2000 was over, it was Rove who suggested that 4 million evangelical Christians had stayed at home. All the Republicans had to do to win the next time, he said, was persuade them to get out and vote.

Now last Tuesday’s result has cemented Rove’s position as a rare political genius. Right up until the results were announced, the conventional wisdom held that a big turnout would help Kerry. The sight of huge queues to vote, and polling stations staying open for extra hours, all fed the idea that Kerry would win. But the results instead proved Rove correct. It was the religious right, not just Bush-bashing Democrats, who flocked to vote.

That was especially true in Ohio, the crucial state on which the whole election hinged. Some polls suggest about a quarter of voters in Ohio described themselves as evangelical Christians. They voted overwhelmingly for Bush. If they had not — and Kerry lost Ohio only by some 130,000 votes — it would now be a Democratic White House. Those are “breathtaking numbers for Ohio. The religious fundamentalists turned out in enormous numbers,” said Ken Warren, a political scientist at St. Louis University in Missouri.

Rove began to believe victory was in sight at 11.35 p.m. on Tuesday. At that time enough results were coming in from Ohio and Florida to indicate the Republicans had won both crucial states. Rove was in his second-floor office in the White House while below him Bush and the senior members of the Bush family hosted an intimate seafood buffet of crab cakes, salmon and shrimp. As the major TV networks began to call Florida for Bush in the next hour, the party began.

Rove’s strategy was based on twin pillars. The first one was religion, which often translated into a set of traditional cultural values around gay marriage, abortion and a simple style of faith-based leadership. It was not just evangelical Christians that this appealed to. Bush’s support among Roman Catholics jumped to 52 percent from 47 percent, despite the fact that Kerry is himself a Catholic. Bush’s support among Jewish voters also jumped, as did his support among Hispanics. The only socially conservative group that largely shrugged off Bush’s appeal was black Americans — the most loyal Democratic voting bloc.

The second pillar was Rove’s devastatingly effective organization that blitzed the end of the campaign in a frenzied final 72 hours of hitting the phones, stumping the pavements and getting to the polls. Run on a tightly disciplined pyramid design, Rove commanded an army of 1.2 million volunteers with branches in every one of America’s counties. It was also almost entirely staffed by committed volunteers. That was in stark contrast to the Democrats, who used many paid outside organizations to recruit and register voters. Such dedication by the Republicans’ core supporters is the envy of Democratic organizers. “They are more robotic than we are, and I mean that as a compliment,” said former Clinton White House aide Larry Haas. “They decide what they need to do in order to win, and they don’t let anything interfere with that.”

That was true inside the Bush campaign itself. It was a tightly run affair, always focused on putting out simple lines and rarely wavering even in the face of a tide of bad news from Iraq and the economy. Steering it all was Rove, but he had able and ruthless deputies. One of them was Steven Schmidt, head of the Republican “war room” geared to attacking Kerry. Schmidt, dubbed “the General” by his staff, was fond of walking the corridors of his headquarters urging people to “Kill, kill, kill.” It was Schmidt who was responsible for identifying and rapidly spreading the most lethal attack on Kerry of the campaign — when Kerry defended his stance on funding the Iraq war by saying: “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.”

The Bush campaign was helped by Kerry’s frequent missteps. A picture is now emerging from inside the Democratic campaign of a petulant candidate who frequently complained that things were going wrong. Kerry was often indecisive, hesitating to make decisions. It also reveals how outsiders, like his wife Teresa Heinz Kerry and other family members, had too much influence. Finally, and in utter contrast to Rove’s operation, the Kerry campaign consisted of bickering tribes of staffers, often vying with each other rather than working in unison.

Kerry, who hails from traditionally liberal Massachusetts, also presented an easy target for Republicans. “Who thought it was a good idea to run a Massachusetts liberal who has married two rich women and now owns five mansions?” said David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter who coined the phrase “Axis of Evil.”

Certainly the ad attacks against Kerry were brutal. Nothing else should be expected of Rove, who is a master of the darker arts of campaigning. Yet Kerry often gave as good as he got. After winning the Democratic nomination as a more moderate voice than the antiwar Howard Dean, Kerry ended up taking a very Dean line by the campaign’s end. Kerry’s attacks on Iraq, the Patriot Act and the influence of defense company Halliburton were all straight from Dean’s playbook.

Kerry was also backed up by a ground operation that succeeded in turning out record numbers of voters. But it was not enough. The Democrats simply missed the main issues of the day: religion and values. That this was central to the result is apparent in the views of Anthony Falzarano, who runs an antique shop in Ohio’s Jefferson County. Falzarano, who lives in an area of the state dominated by closed steel mills and hit by job losses, has not been able to afford healthcare for seven years. Nor has his wife or his children. But that did not dictate his vote. He is an evangelical Christian. “I support Bush,” he said. “We are closet Republicans and there are a lot of us around here.” The polls proved Falzarano and Rove, and not the Democratic pundits, right.

Every 10 years the U.S. Census Bureau has a bit of harmless fun and calculates the demographic center of America’s shifting population. It is an imaginary spot on the map where America would balance perfectly if placed on a pivot. The spot is moving south and west by several miles a year — straight into the Republican heartland.

With the reelection of President Bush the political map of America has now finally caught up with its population map. The last census in 2000 put America’s center in Phelps County, Mo. Last week Phelps County voted for Bush by a margin of 63 percent to 36 percent. Missouri itself is a sea of red around isolated patches of blue in its two big cities of St. Louis and Kansas City. And the trend line of the spot spells even more future gloom for Democrats. By now, four years after the last census, it has probably already left Phelps County. It is moving straight for redder than red Kansas.

The Democrats are now coming to terms with the fact that America — albeit by a narrow margin — has become a Republican country. They face a Republican president and Republican control of both houses of Congress. “We have to contend with that reality. We are a minority party,” said Will Marshall, head of the Progressive Policy Institute, an influential Democratic think tank.

The party now faces a bitter fight between those who believe the Democrats should return to liberal values and those who feel that they should fight the Republicans on cultural issues. “The Democrats just have to take a long, hard look in the mirror. They are in deep trouble. They face the wilderness years,” said Shawn Bowler, a political scientist at the University of California.

Meanwhile, the Republicans will have four years to implement their agenda. That is likely to involve appointing conservative judges to the Supreme Court and a possible ban on abortion in many states. It will also see Bush’s tax cuts made permanent and further reforms of the tax code amid a move to privatize Social Security. Bush is also committed to seeking a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.

All of this is music to the ears of people like Tim Wildmon, president of the American Family Association, an influential religious-right pressure group. “We have got great momentum now. The test is whether President Bush will deliver for us,” he said. Certainly the religious right is going to benefit from the influx of new Republican blood in the Senate. Tim Coburn, newly elected from Oklahoma, has warned of a “gay agenda” in America and advocated the death penalty for doctors who perform abortions. Jim DeMint, from South Carolina, wants to ban gay people from teaching in public schools. Bush called DeMint Nov. 3 to congratulate him on his victory and said he would now press ahead with a fresh Republican agenda in a second term.

“Now is the time to get it done,” the president said. If Bush does not, he will risk angering the people to whom he owes his victory. Wildmon certainly intends to ensure that does not happen. “We are going to hold their feet to the fire for the next few years. We see our job as a watchdog,” he said.

Bush and his administration are unlikely to be shy in pressing ahead with their advantage. In 2000, fresh from losing the popular ballot by half a million votes and winning with a controversial decision in the Supreme Court, the Bush administration was expected by many to strike a moderate tone. “From the very day we walked in the building,” Vice President Cheney once said privately, there was “a notion of sort of a restrained presidency because it was such a close election. That lasted maybe 30 seconds.”

Now Bush is resuming office as the first president to be reelected while gaining seats in both houses of Congress since 1936. He is the first Republican to do so since 1924. He has won a higher percentage of the popular vote than any Democrat since 1964. “If that isn’t a mandate, then what is?” asked Frum. This time, in an America still bitterly divided, any notion of a restrained second Bush presidency will likely not last even 30 seconds.