US: 2002 saw George Bush secure his presidency after a faltering - not to say questionable - start. As Conor O'Clery reports, he and his team have become a major force in US politics.
One of the most serious political misjudgements of the year was made by Terence McAuliffe, national chairman of the Democratic party, who threw the party's resources into an attempt to defeat Governor Jeb Bush in Florida in November's mid-term elections. He would, Mr McAuliffe boasted, pick off the Bush brothers, one at a time, first Jeb in 2002, then George in 2004.
But it didn't work out like that. Jeb Bush won handily in Florida and the Dem's were left licking their wounds. Nationwide, George Bush made history by increasing his party's representation in both houses of Congress and, for the first time since the Civil War, winning back a majority for his party in the US Senate in a mid-term contest.
Bush the younger has come a long way since he secured the White House in 2000 on a minority popular vote and a partisan Supreme Court ruling. The mid-term elections showed he had become in two years the major force to be reckoned with in American politics.
His ability to shape the political landscape to his advantage was made clear in the hectic scramble for Senate and House seats in the November elections. Bush barnstormed around the country, energising party workers, lending the prestige of Air Force One to struggling candidates. Some 21 out of 23 House members and 12 of 16 Senate candidates won their elections after Bush had come to their aid.
What had happened here? Was this not "Dubya", the entitled fraternity boy, the lightweight candidate famous for his malapropisms, like "I know how hard it is to put food on your family", the accidental president who said after the 2000 presidential election, "they misunderestimated me"?
For a start, two years on they were still "misunderestimating" him. Bush pulled off an extraordinary feat in crushing the vengeful Democrats, and as a result is now the first Republican president since Eisenhower in the mid- 1950s to have his party in control of both houses of Congress.
The extraordinary transformation of Bush in the eyes of American voters came about in the immediate aftermath of September 11th. The country rallied around the Commander in Chief as he struggled to cope with attacks that stunned the nation. War transforms an American presidency. This time the danger was personal and people felt threatened and looked for leadership. As former Clinton adviser Sandy Berger said, national security had become a matter of personal security.
Bush's presidency had been shaky before that. He had been losing popularity, governing as if he had a mandate for a right-wing programme of tax cuts that mostly favoured the wealthy. As the economy stalled his popularity ratings had hovered around 50 per cent. After the attacks his ratings soared upwards, touching 90 per cent in one late September Gallup Poll. People wanted him to succeed. He found his voice and communicated a sense of resolution. He articulated the urge to strike back, declaring war on America's attackers.
The war went well at first. But after the defeat of the Taliban, the wider war on terrorism got bogged down. Osama bin Laden was not caught "dead or alive" as Bush wanted.
There were legislative setbacks too. Bush's plan for oil drilling in Alaska was rejected in Congress. His judicial nominees were being blocked in the Democrat-controlled Senate. Then came the Enron debacle and embarrassment for Bush, who was the largest political beneficiary of former chairman "Kenny Boy" Ken Lay. Investor confidence collapsed as post-boom scandals engulfed the business and financial world. Bush, leader of an administration drawn from corporate America, was forced to promise new business regulation and to get tough on white collar crime.
The focus changed however at the end of the summer of 2002. It changed because of Iraq. Bush decided to take on Saddam Hussein. Within weeks the talk was all of a new war in the Gulf.
The new mood of belligerency alarmed the world. Bush looked set to go it alone against the dictator "who tried to kill my dad". After all, this was an isolationist president who had walked away from the Kyoto and the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, who refused to fully engage in the Middle East peace process, who called Ariel Sharon a "man of peace" and spurned a world conference on racism, who preached free markets but signed a bloated farm bill and put tariffs on steel and lumber to protect US interests.
Bush's top advisers, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defence Minister Donald Rumsfeld and Rumsfeld's deputy Paul Wolfowitz, supported a pre-emptive attack on Iraq, backed not by the UN but by an international "coalition of the willing". In August, Cheney confirmed this when he said renewed inspections would be "dangerous" and "provide false comfort" that Saddam Hussein was "back in his box".
But Bush had begun to listen more closely to his Secretary of State, Colin Powell who urged him to work through the United Nations. As the world's superpower - the Bush "doctrine" was based on preventing any military competitor from ever coming close - America could get its way by forceful diplomacy. Most countries needed its favours or feared falling out of favour.
One of the most important turning points came on September 12th, when Bush went to the United Nations, a body often dismissed by Republican conservatives as inimical to American interests. He announced that he would seek a new resolution to send back weapons inspectors, rather than go straight to war. He made the United Nations the issue, not America, challenging it to confront Iraq or become as ineffective as the pre-second World War League of Nations.
It was a triumph for Powell over Cheney in the battle for the president's ear, and a defining moment for Bush. The speech was a big hit throughout a relieved world, and next day Iraq agreed to new inspections.
Bush then stepped up the rhetoric against Saddam Hussein and used the upsurge in patriotic fervour, and the ever-present fear of further terrorist attack, to get Congress to give him the authority to go to war against Iraq, alone if necessary.
The new national "emergency" helped the "Bushies" to set the agenda for debate as the mid-term election campaign got under way. Democrats were thrown on the defensive. Many had voted with Republicans on the war resolution, some out of conviction, some fearing to look unpatriotic. They were put off guard and off message.
For example in almost every speech during the autumn campaign, Bush made a plea for Congress to get on with passing a Bill to create a mammoth new Department of Homeland Security in the interests of a safer America. The message was that opposing it was unpatriotic. This was aimed at Democrats in the Senate who were holding up the Bill because it had been loaded by republicans with provisions anathema to organised labour. The Democrats failed to get their legitimate objections across. In the campaign they also failed to convince enough voters that Bush was promising the impossible, pledging to cut taxes and improve education and health care and maintain an oil-based SUV-culture, while spending billions on war with Iraq and on terrorism.
Out in the gun-loving American heartland of fries-with-everything, people liked Bush. It didn't matter that he lacked intellectual and emotional depth. They said what he wanted to hear. He stirred up the crowds with tough talk. He carried the country.
With his victory in the mid-term elections, Bush gained the legitimacy he lacked. As an exuberant Wall Street Journal editorial said the day after his election victory, Bush took office in 2001, but "yesterday he took charge." Bush is now in a position to get judicial appointments through Congress that could influence America's ideology for years to come. He can make his tax cuts permanent.
Not everything is going his way. His economic team disintegrated, casting doubt on the wisdom of his choices, and the Trent Lott affair has left the Senate Republican majority in turmoil. An anti-war movement has also been growing throughout the country that could assert itself more vigorously in the coming year.
Bush will be concentrating now on avoiding the fate of his father and becoming a two-term president. The war will ultimately be measured by the outcome, as his adviser Karl Rove said. For now the White House attitude is that "it's the war, stupid". The danger for Bush is that the shelf-life of that message may not last to 2004. But at least next time the Democrats will take him more seriously. They won't "misunderestimate" him in 2004.