George Bush beat John Kerry because he outplayed him in the election campaign again and again and again. Conor O'Clery, in New York, describes how the president won himself four more years.
How did it come to this? How did America elect for a second term a president who took the country to war for discredited reasons, a war which has damaged US prestige, caused over 1,000 American fatalities and shamed America with images from Abu Ghraib? How could 60 million or so American voters give another term to a president who showered tax benefits on the wealthy while the number of poor and people without healthcare increased, a president who presided over a net loss of jobs and brought about a crippling deficit.
Looking back, it is possible to appreciate somewhat better than during the heat of battle the dynamics of the bitter, year-long struggle for the White House. The first entries in my election notebooks for 2004 were about the wild ride of Howard Dean (remember him?), the Democratic front-runner.
As the year began, fervent young Dean supporters were having meet-ups all over America. I went to one in the Kettle of Fish in Greenwich Village, where Beat poet Alan Ginsberg used to hang out, and found dozens of people writing letters to Iowa voters asking them to support Dean in the Iowa caucuses. In Iowa a few days later, for the first test for the Democratic rivals, I found young Dean volunteers from all across the United States lobbying for their anti-war hero.
I also encountered the first evidence of what conservative "red-state" America thought of the former Vermont governor. A Republican television ad showed an Iowa farmer complaining: "Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading . . . Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs."
That just about summed up the whole Republican case against the Democrats. But it was John Kerry who was surging among Iowa Democrats, not Dean. I could hardly get into the Des Moines hall, where the Massachusetts senator held an emotional reunion with Jim Rassman, a Vietnam veteran and a Republican whose life Kerry had saved in the Mekong delta in 1969 and who came from California to join his campaign.
On election night I attended a caucus in the wood-panelled courthouse in the town of Winterset and found Dean voters in the minority. It was the same all across the state. Iowa Democrats had decided that they wanted someone who was electable in November, and Dean wasn't ready for prime time.
He then self-destructed with one teeth-baring finger-pointing cry of "Yeaaahhhhhh- ghhhh!" in the Val Air ballroom in Des Moines as he vowed to fight on.
It was Kerry, however, who went on to draw the biggest crowds in snowy New Hampshire, and the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign realised he was the one they would have to deal with. The first Republican attack ads against Kerry began to appear. They portrayed the Massachusetts senator as weak on defence and a flip-flopper on policies. Unaware of a live microphone, Kerry was heard muttering: "These guys are the most crooked, lying group I've ever seen. It's scary."
It was to get scarier.
Kerry's campaign fought back. They hoped that by portraying their candidate as a war hero they would gain a moral advantage over George Bush, who avoided Vietnam by joining the National Guard. Michael Moore, the anti-Bush film-maker and author, called the president a "deserter" and Democratic Party chairman Terry McAuliffe accused him of not even fulfilling his National Guard duties. This revived the bitter divisions in America over Vietnam - and it would in the end work against the Democratic candidate, who underestimated the ruthlessness of the opposition.
At this stage, however, all the signs were that Kerry could actually win. Bush was getting bad ratings on Iraq. The head of the US team searching for weapons of mass destruction admitted that "we were all wrong" and that there were none. Colin Powell confessed that, if he had known, he was not sure he would have recommended an invasion.
Over Easter, some 100 US soldiers were killed. Richard Clark, Bush's former counter-terrorism adviser, stunned the public with his testimony that "by invading Iraq, the president of the United States has gravely undermined the war on terrorism". Bush's ratings dropped below 50 per cent, a danger point for a president seeking re-election.
But Kerry, exhausted by the primary struggle, began making mistakes. Addressing a rally, he explained his Senate vote on Iraq appropriations by telling West Virginia veterans: "I actually did vote for the $87 billion, before I voted against it."
Then he went off skiing in exclusive Sun Valley, Idaho, as Bush officially launched his re-election campaign in Orlando, Florida. There he mocked Kerry by quoting his explanation for the $87 billion vote. It produced derisory cries of "Flip-flop! Flip-flop!"
Thereafter, Bush used this in every speech, right up to November, to portray Kerry as indecisive. The Kerry quote was "the gift that kept giving", said Bush adviser Karl Rove, who crafted Bush's most effective lines.
That spring I saw Rove's rotund, balding figure offstage in the Marriot hotel ballroom in Washington observing audience reaction as Bush addressed a Conservative Union dinner. I jotted in my notebook the lines that got the biggest response. "If it was a choice between trusting a madman like Saddam Hussein or defending America, I will defend America every time" and "It is better to defeat the terrorists in Iraq so we do not have to face them in our own country".
These, too, stayed in the stump speech to the end. Kerry meanwhile struggled to connect with the wider audience after the intimacy of Iowa and New Hampshire. I watched him address union leaders at Bally's casino in Atlantic City as "folk". At a rally for the National Association of Colored People in Philadelphia, he gave an awkward black power salute - and a picture of his raised fist was on conservative websites within the hour.
Rove never missed a trick and every day talking points went out to campaign organisers and sympathetic media. For example, after Kerry attended a celebrity-studded rally at New York's Radio City Music Hall, where Chevy Chase called Bush a "liar" and Whoopi Goldberg made a sexual word play on the president's surname, conservative talk radio hosts in unison attacked the gala as "filled with hate and vitriol".
The culture wars seemed, however, to be working in Kerry's favour. In late June, at a performance of the musical Frogs in New York, the audience cheered Nathan Lane, playing an ancient Greek, when he said Helena was at war, "a war we shouldn't even be in".
In the theatre, the cinema and the book stores, Bush-bashing came into vogue. Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11, which portrayed Bush as a simpleton, opened to packed houses across the US. Nowhere was anti-Bush sentiment stronger than in Democratic New York (though, in my apartment block, residents contributed $2,883 to Bush but only $250 to Kerry, according to a donations website).
In the Republican heartlands, people were less inclined to question the war. At a funeral service near Cincinnati, Ohio, for Sgt Charles Kiser (37), a reservist killed in Iraq, family members recalled that he said as he left: "Don't cry for me - this is the highlight of my life."
I had driven there from a rally in Columbus marking the first appearance of Kerry with his choice for running-mate, Senator John Edwards of North Carolina. The silver-tongued trial lawyer was a populist Southern counter-point to an elite Northerner. This was the combination to beat Bush and Cheney, Democrats hoped. But Edwards proved insubstantial and gradually faded like the Cheshire cat until all that remained was his dazzling smile.
Summer brought no let-up for Bush on Iraq. George Tenet quit the CIA as his pre- war evidence was ridiculed in the Senate. The 9/11 Commission found no credible evidence of collaboration between Iraq and al-Qaeda, a favourite theme of Dick Cheney.
This did not deter the vice-president. He simply denied the finding, saying the evidence was "overwhelming". I went to see Cheney at a fund-raising breakfast in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The priest who said grace prayed for "enough money to fund the campaign and enough votes to win the election". Many Catholic clergy openly sided with the Bush-Cheney ticket over abortion.
The vice-president told the diners over hash browns and scrambled eggs that "terrorist attacks are not caused by the use of strength; they are invited by the perception of weakness". A couple of weeks later he took scare-mongering a step further by warning that America was in danger of "being hit again" if voters elected Kerry.
At the same time, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge issued warnings of imminent attacks against New York, Washington and Newark, based on "unusually specific information" about surveillance by al-Qaeda suspects. Heavily-armed police appeared on the streets. Only later did we hear that the surveillance was three to four years old.
The high point for the Kerry campaign came with the Democratic Party Convention in Boston. It proved to be a missed opportunity. In his speech, Kerry portrayed himself as nothing more than Bush Lite, critical of the war and its architects but offering no way out rather than to improve relations with the world. Kerry hammed up his war hero image, saluting and "reporting for duty" and surrounding himself on stage with fellow Vietnam veterans. He got a nasty response from other veterans who had never forgiven his anti-war activities in the 1970s. The so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth slandered Kerry in TV ads run throughout August in three states.
With little else happening, the ads dominated the news for weeks on 24-hour cable channels. The Democratic candidate, his campaign in chaos over staffing, failed to respond. Later, his campaign manager, Beth Cahill, would admit that that was a huge mistake. The election turned into a referendum on the alleged misdeeds of a genuine war hero - who saved Rassman's life under fire - rather than on Bush's efforts to avoid it.
The Democratic convention is also remembered for Teresa Heinz Kerry telling a conservative journalist to "shove it", a minor incident which was played up to confirm the impression that she was a loose cannon.
By contrast, Laura Bush never put a foot wrong as she campaigned across America for her husband. The First Lady's clean-cut image didn't save her from heckling by Sue Niederer, the mother of a dead soldier, at a firehouse rally in Hamilton, New Jersey. As I interviewed Ms Niederer after she had been escorted outside, police slapped handcuffs on her and loaded her into a police van for refusing to move away from the entrance.
I joined the Bush campaign again in Saginaw, Michigan, shortly before the Republican Convention in New York in September. The crowd in a local basketball stadium were whipped into a patriotic fervour by the Gatlin Brothers - "musicians who have their thinking straight" - and greeted Bush like a rock star.
"Do I forget the lessons of September 11th and trust a madman?" he cried. "No!"
"We must engage the enemies around the world so we do not have to face them here at home."
"Yes! USA! USA!"
Travelling on to Texas, I got an insight into how powerfully such sentiments played in the red states. Over dinner in a Dallas steak-house, half a dozen prominent Republican supporters told me they had turned their backs on their pro-union Democratic family traditions because they through the Democratic Party was soft on defence and hung up on abortion and gay marriage.
They said that the gay marriages in Democratic San Francisco suggested that, with Democrats running the country, the social order would break down. One had been a top FBI official in Iraq and had been shocked to find captured insurgents telling him under interrogation that they wanted to get out and kill more Americans. Pointing around the table, he said: "They want to kill you and you and you and you and you, but [ pointing to me] not you. That's why we [ Americans] have to take the fight to them."
At the Republican Convention, two relatively moderate party icons, Rudi Giuliani and Arnold Schwarzenegger, were put on centre stage to display a moderate Republican Party. As thousands of anti-war demonstrators massed in the Manhattan streets outside, Bush told delegates he was running as a "compassionate conservative", a phrase not heard since he campaigned in 2000, and that his mission was to bring democracy to the world.
A few days later Kerry made another major miscalculation when Bush challenged him to answer yes or no, would he have supported the invasion of Iraq, "knowing what we know now" Democrats waited for Kerry to reply that it wouldn't even have come to a vote.Instead, at a Grand Canyon stop-over, when asked again, he told reporters: "Yes, I would [ still] have voted for the authority [ to wage war]."
This was another gift for Karl Rove that kept giving. Later, when Kerry started calling Iraq "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time", Bush was able to mock him for inconsistency. Kerry recovered during the presidential debates - what was that bulge in the president's jacket? - and in late October he seemed at last to catch fire.
I drove to see him speak at a university in Pittsburgh and found a queue over a mile long. When Bill Clinton joined him in Philadelphia, 80,000 people filled Benjamin Franklin Parkway from City Hall to the Art Museum to taste the magic. It seemed that the anti-Bush outrage of Democrats would overcome all the campaign missteps.
Not even Ralph Nader posed a threat to a Kerry victory. I caught up with the consumer advocate in Las Vegas University and, as we talked, a student interrupted to shake his hand and say: "Mr Nader, I just wanted to say hello because I've never met another Ralph before." That about summed up Nader's impact on the campaign.
Kerry in the end got five million more votes than Al Gore in 2000 - but Bush got eight million more. He won despite the setbacks in the war because, to red America, he seemed to be more passionate about defending the country. Kerry lost the key battle-ground states of Florida and Ohio and, in the end, Bush got a mandate of a three million popular vote majority.
So what will a second term bring? At his post-election press conference, Bush said: "I earned capital in the campaign and now I intend to spend it."
He would "reach out to everyone who shares our goals", he said, which may or may not have been a slip of the tongue. "There's probably some scepticism in your beady eyes there," he joked to a reporter who pressed him on the issue. But Mr Bush did not reach out much to the less than enthusiastic members of his own administration. Colin Powell was first to go. He was replaced by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who works out and prays with Bush every day.
Another to get the boot was Frances Berry, chairman of the administration's Civil Rights Commission, who had scolded presidents for 25 years. She was replaced by Gerald Reynolds, a conservative lawyer. Loyalists in the administration either remained or got top jobs. Rice's deputy, Stephen Hadley, became national security adviser, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales got justice and Bush's personal lawyer, Harriet Miers, succeeded Gonzales.
The top hawks remained in place, including Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Pentagon officials Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith. George Tenet, who as CIA director hyped weapons of mass destruction as a "slam-dunk", was given a presidential Medal of Honour. Bush offered Homeland Security to New York cop Bernard Kerik, who had enough skeletons to fill a haunted house and had to withdraw in ignominy. His decision to keep on the increasingly inept Rumsfeld has sparked dissent in Republican ranks.
There are still enough Democrats in the Senate - 45 out of 100 - to filibuster any nominees to the Supreme Court considered too conservative. The president's plans to privatise socialsecurity will involve bitter fights and may be sabotaged by the soaring deficit, and his decision to allow drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge will also be furiously opposed. And there is no telling how badly the war in Iraq will get. Bush ended his press conference by telling the reporters: "Gosh, we're going to have a lot of fun."
But maybe not so much.