My Life and Times

November 4, 2004THE CAMPAIGN
Tireless Push to Raise Turnout Was Crucial in G.O.P. VictoryBy ELISABETH BUMILLER
his article was reported by Elisabeth Bumiller, David M. Halbfinger and David E. Rosenbaum and written by Ms. Bumiller.
WASHINGTON, Nov. 3 - In the closing hours of President Bush's campaign for re-election, Karl Rove, his chief political adviser, was obsessed with turning out Republican votes. Late on Monday night, Mr. Rove stood in the cold at a rally in Albuquerque and pulled scraps of paper from his pocket covered with numbers that reassured him that his ground army was in full assault.
"In Nevada, where last time there were 598,000 votes cast, our organization made 130,000 contacts," Mr. Rove said, rattling off the statistics. "That's 100,000 targeted phone calls and knocks on the door of 30,000 targeted households. These are less active Bush-oriented voters, people who have not had a pattern of voting, Democrats, Republicans and independents."
He had similar numbers for Florida, Pennsylvania and every other contested state, all part of his four-year effort to prod the Republicans into matching the high Democratic turnout in presidential elections. "What we're trying to do is get our efforts up to parity," he said.
On Tuesday night, Mr. Rove succeeded, as Mr. Bush was re-elected with a margin of 3.5 million votes, in the first presidential election in modern history with an equal turnout of Democrats and Republicans. Mr. Rove's relentless focus on turning out more Republican voters, many of them evangelical Christians, was the critical factor in Mr. Bush's victory, Republicans said.
Other factors, Republicans said, were Mr. Bush's gamble to run on terrorism and his repeated use of a clear, concise message. And Bush campaign officials said they were helped by the man they called a dream opponent, Senator John Kerry, whose nuanced statements about Iraq gave them an opening, day after day, to attack him as a "flip-flopper."
Their high point, Bush campaign officials said, came in the spring, when Mr. Kerry uttered the now-famous line that he had voted for $87 billion for American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan before he voted against it.
"It was the most iconic moment of the campaign," said Mark McKinnon, the president's chief media strategist. "As soon as we saw it, we knew that was exactly what we wanted to say, but he said it for us. That's something he couldn't undo."
But in Boston on the morning after Mr. Kerry's defeat, the harsh hindsight had begun. Despite the applause heaped upon his campaign manager, Mary Beth Cahill, some advisers were already pointing to what they called the major strategic errors of his campaign. All requested anonymity because they did not want to be seen as criticizing the candidate at a painful time.
Kerry advisers cited the senator's lack of a clear and consistent message right up until mid-September, and suggested that his theme-of-the-week inconsistency and shifting attacks on the president in some ways bore out Mr. Bush's argument that Mr. Kerry was too indecisive and vacillating to lead the nation.
Many advisers said Mr. Kerry's most obvious mistake was his long delay in responding forcefully to the attacks by members of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the group of Vietnam veterans who criticized Mr. Kerry in a best-selling book and television commercials as a liar, a traitor and a coward.
But some of Mr. Kerry's most trusted friends and supporters said the delay on the Swift-boat issue only spotlighted a weakness in his campaign that had been apparent since Mr. Bush began labeling him as a flip-flopper in March, an accusation he never forcefully repulsed. "They weren't prepared to defend his character," a longtime friend said.
But there were other major behind-the-scenes mistakes. Much as Mr. Kerry had proved a fearless gambler a year ago, mortgaging his house to finance his candidacy and staking his campaign on a come-from-behind victory in Iowa, his campaign against Mr. Bush was marked by moments of caution, some advisers said, like his decision to accept $75 million in public money for the fall campaign and the spending cap that came with it, rather than opting out and raising and spending as much as he could.
The practical effect was that Mr. Kerry's campaign could not afford to spend money on advertising in August, at the height of the Swift-boat group's attacks.
Those who argued against opting out said Mr. Kerry would probably have had only $4 million to $5 million left after the Democratic convention. As it turned out, he had more than $45 million.
In the end, some of Mr. Kerry's longtime advisers asserted that his campaign and high-priced consultants had failed him in many ways, but that he had only himself to blame for the clutter of strategists, with no one clearly in charge, whose output was often late and not harnessed into an overall strategy.
"The campaign was never as good as the candidate," one old friend and strategist said. "But that's also a reflection on the candidate."
Bush campaign officials said they had a candidate who was better than their campaign, which was in itself a tightly run, richly financed and highly disciplined message machine. And while Mr. Bush's advisers readily conceded that he fell short in the debates, on the stump in front of friendly Republicans Mr. Bush was a charismatic performer.
"We had at the top of the ticket an inspiring individual who knew what he believed and did what he said," Mr. Rove said Wednesday. "At the end of the day, people voted for him for two reasons. One is they thought he could do the job, and two, they had deep doubts about the other guy."
Many of those voters, Mr. Rove said, were evangelical Christians, although he said he could not tell directly from polls of voters if evangelicals had turned out in greater numbers than they had in 2000. But there is some evidence that they did.
Mr. Rove has long said that Mr. Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 in part because four million evangelicals stayed home, perhaps, he said, because of an old drunken driving charge against Mr. Bush that surfaced the weekend before the election and perhaps because many evangelicals traditionally viewed politics with distaste.
But in this election, evangelicals said they were motivated to turn out because of Mr. Bush's support for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, prompted by a decision a year ago by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court allowing such marriages in the state. In addition, Republicans said evangelical voters had an extra incentive because 11 states had amendments to ban same-sex marriage on the ballot.
"For the first time in our country's history, the definition of marriage has been changed by a court," said Tom Minnery, vice president of public policy at Focus on the Family, an influential conservative Christian group, in an interview on Wednesday. "That was a wake-up call."
Mr. Minnery said that evangelicals turned out in large numbers for Mr. Bush in 2004 because they knew him better than they did in 2000 and recognized the biblical phrasing in many of his speeches. "In his first term, he was the most openly Christian president we have had in our lifetime," Mr. Minnery said. "And that endeared many Christian people to him."'
Republicans also said Mr. Bush won by broadening the reach of his party, much like Ronald Reagan did in the 1980's.
"He kept faith with every piece of the center-right coalition - taxpayers, property owners, investors, businessmen, home-schoolers, gun owners and all communities of faith," said Grover Norquist, a leading conservative and the president of Americans for Tax Reform.
Mr. Rove argued that rather than just playing hard to his Republican base, Mr. Bush's record total of 58 million votes, the most votes for any presidential candidate in history, proved that he had appealed well beyond his core conservative supporters to small-business people, families concerned about "the coarseness of the culture," and "security moms and dads" worried about terrorism.
Significantly, polls on Election Day showed that the number of voters who said they were concerned about moral values - who voted in overwhelming numbers for Mr. Bush - was higher than those who said they were worried about the war, terrorism, the economy or jobs.
Republicans also said that Mr. Bush won by running hard in the end in what Ken Mehlman, the president's campaign manager, called strong Republican "fortress" areas surrounded by rapidly growing suburbs and exurbs filled with first-time voters.
"The thing that characterized the areas more than anything else was a growing propensity to vote Republican and a significant number of potentially unregistered supporters," Mr. Rove said.
If Mr. Bush and Mr. Rove were determined from the first to get every last evangelical Christian to the polls, Mr. Kerry and his advisers seemed to respond only relatively late in the campaign to what polls eventually showed was his gaping weakness with voters on the question of whether a candidate shared their values.
Campaign aides knew all along that Mr. Kerry, whose New England reticence held him back from discussing his religion, was at a steep disadvantage with Mr. Bush among regular churchgoers. But while he began over the summer sprinkling the word "values" into his speeches, it was mainly in saying that hard work should be rewarded, that the middle class and the poor should be given help before the rich got more.
And while Mr. Bush could use code words like "culture of life" and "armies of compassion" to motivate evangelicals, Mr. Kerry found himself preaching the separation of church and state from pulpits. Late in the campaign, Mr. Kerry spent every weekend visiting churches, taking communion from Roman Catholic priests who welcomed him despite his support for abortion rights.
Sam Greenberg, one of Mr. Kerry's pollsters, said the faith and values problem was "consuming," and added: "He was having immense difficulty breaking through. He's not as secular as he was defined, but that was not what he was able to communicate."
Mr. Kerry did not help himself in getting voters to see him as an ordinary guy when he was photographed windsurfing in August off his Nantucket home, or that he chose a resort to prepare for his first debate, while Mr. Bush was on his ranch, or that his wealthy wife spoke English with an unfamiliar accent and Mr. Kerry spent his childhood summers in France.
"People don't windsurf in Youngstown, Ohio," a longtime top Kerry adviser said.
There were also Mr. Kerry's swings and misses: calling the Green Bay Packers stadium Lambert Field, not Lambeau, and mangling the names even of his own beloved Red Sox.
In candid moments, Mr. Kerry himself often said that, with war and terrorism occupying the nation, he did not think "likeability" would play as important a role in the campaign as it had in the 2000 election. But the longtime aide said that Mr. Kerry, as a challenger facing a well-known incumbent, had no margin of error in his efforts to connect with voters. "It all goes into the pot," the aide said.
The values problem took on enormous significance, Kerry aides said, precisely because of the electoral terrain the campaign was fighting on, which they said posed a major challenge for Democrats in the future: how to talk to Americans in the heartland.
"We were working from a pretty small map here," said Steve Elmendorf, Mr. Kerry's deputy campaign manager. "He was pressuring us much more in places where Gore had won than we were pressuring him where he had won, like New Hampshire and Nevada: those were only four electoral votes. He had us in New Mexico, Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota, and in Pennsylvania and Michigan we could never take our eye off the ball.
"It wasn't a resource question so much as we weren't competitive in places like Missouri and Arkansas that Bush had won, so he was able to take enormous resources and really pour them into those states," Mr. Elmendorf said.
Bill Carrick, a Democratic strategist, said the unfavorable electoral map meant Mr. Kerry had no obvious recipe for a victory, which explains why advisers experimented continually with positive and negative messages and with focusing more on domestic policy or national security.
"I've been in campaigns when you had a clear path to victory if you did one, two and three," Mr. Carrick said. "Here, there was some message testing, because there was no clear path."
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November 4, 2004OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Red ZoneBy MAUREEN DOWD
ASHINGTON
With the Democratic Party splattered at his feet in little blue puddles, John Kerry told the crushed crowd at Faneuil Hall in Boston about his concession call to President Bush.
"We had a good conversation," the senator said. "And we talked about the danger of division in our country and the need, the desperate need, for unity, for finding the common ground, coming together. Today I hope that we can begin the healing."
Democrat: Heal thyself.
W. doesn't see division as a danger. He sees it as a wingman.
The president got re-elected by dividing the country along fault lines of fear, intolerance, ignorance and religious rule. He doesn't want to heal rifts; he wants to bring any riffraff who disagree to heel.
W. ran a jihad in America so he can fight one in Iraq - drawing a devoted flock of evangelicals, or "values voters," as they call themselves, to the polls by opposing abortion, suffocating stem cell research and supporting a constitutional amendment against gay marriage.
Mr. Bush, whose administration drummed up fake evidence to trick us into war with Iraq, sticking our troops in an immoral position with no exit strategy, won on "moral issues."
The president says he's "humbled" and wants to reach out to the whole country. What humbug. The Bushes are always gracious until they don't get their way. If W. didn't reach out after the last election, which he barely grabbed, why would he reach out now that he has what Dick Cheney calls a "broad, nationwide victory"?
While Mr. Bush was making his little speech about reaching out, Republicans said they had "the green light" to pursue their conservative agenda, like drilling in Alaska's wilderness and rewriting the tax code.
"He'll be a lot more aggressive in Iraq now," one Bush insider predicts. "He'll raze Falluja if he has to. He feels that the election results endorsed his version of the war." Never mind that the more insurgents American troops kill, the more they create.
Just listen to Dick (Oh, lordy, is this cuckoo clock still vice president?) Cheney, introducing the Man for his victory speech: "This has been a consequential presidency which has revitalized our economy and reasserted a confident American role in the world." Well, it has revitalized the Halliburton segment of the economy, anyhow. And "confident" is not the first word that comes to mind for the foreign policy of a country that has alienated everyone except Fiji.
Vice continued, "Now we move forward to serve and to guard the country we love." Only Dick Cheney can make "to serve and to guard" sound like "to rape and to pillage."
He's creating the sort of "democracy" he likes. One party controls all power in the country. One network serves as state TV. One nation dominates the world as a hyperpower. One firm controls contracts in Iraq.
Just as Zell Miller was so over the top at the G.O.P. convention that he made Mr. Cheney seem reasonable, so several new members of Congress will make W. seem moderate.
Tom Coburn, the new senator from Oklahoma, has advocated the death penalty for doctors who perform abortions and warned that "the gay agenda" would undermine the country. He also characterized his race as a choice between "good and evil" and said he had heard there was "rampant lesbianism" in Oklahoma schools.
Jim DeMint, the new senator from South Carolina, said during his campaign that he supported a state G.O.P. platform plank banning gays from teaching in public schools. He explained, "I would have given the same answer when asked if a single woman who was pregnant and living with her boyfriend should be hired to teach my third-grade children."
John Thune, who toppled Tom Daschle, is an anti-abortion Christian conservative - or "servant leader," as he was hailed in a campaign ad - who supports constitutional amendments banning flag burning and gay marriage.
Seeing the exit polls, the Democrats immediately started talking about values and religion. Their sudden passion for wooing Southern white Christian soldiers may put a crimp in Hillary's 2008 campaign (nothing but a wooden stake would stop it). Meanwhile, the blue puddle is comforting itself with the expectation that this loony bunch will fatally overreach, just as Newt Gingrich did in the 90's.
But with this crowd, it's hard to imagine what would constitute overreaching.
Invading France?
E-mail: liberties@nytimes.com
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November 4, 2004EDITORIAL
The Next President Bush
resident George W. Bush has put to rest all the ghosts of his father's one-term administration. He won a solid re-election victory on Tuesday night. The country remains, of course, divided. It is the point of a national election to illuminate divisions - these days in stark blue and red. The 49 percent of the voting public who wanted a different outcome are disappointed, and in some cases crushed and frightened about the future of the country. Their first job is to accept the will of the majority. Then it will be time for everyone - Mr. Bush, the victorious Republicans and the people who opposed them - to decide what to do next.
Mr. Bush can either try for four years of the same, or look to his place in history. Yesterday, he offered at least some hope that he was choosing the higher road. "A new term is a new opportunity to reach out to the whole nation," he told the Kerry voters. Experience suggests that these conversions are short-lived. Four years ago, according to Vice President Dick Cheney, when Mr. Bush lost the popular vote and seemed to be in a position where consensus-seeking was a given, White House officials thought about taking a compromise centrist route for "about 30 seconds" before grabbing their old partisan agenda and running with it. In his speech yesterday, Mr. Cheney stressed the president's mandate. Given the way Mr. Cheney behaved during the first term, it's unnerving to imagine what he may have in mind now.
Obviously, the losers in this election are going to be far more eager to see Mr. Bush take a different, more moderate route this time than the winners - especially the triumphalist Congressional Republican leaders. But there's a yearning out there, in red states as well as blue, for a government that works better and with less partisanship. Many of the voters who support Mr. Bush are just as unhappy about economic uncertainties, lost jobs and the number of people who have no health insurance as the people who voted for Mr. Kerry. Vast majorities of Americans want to keep the federal deficit under control, make Social Security financially sound, protect benefits like Medicare and Medicaid, and be sure that there's adequate spending on homeland security.
Mr. Bush can address that national yearning - and leave a magnificent legacy to the country - but such an effort will require bipartisan action. Except for his education initiative, the president's domestic agenda thus far has been the product of the Republicans alone, and it has been a mess that has made nobody very happy. Tax cuts are easy to pass, even irresponsible ones. But spending cuts are not, and the president's own party refused to make them happen. Instead, Republican leaders bought the passage of the bills they needed by piling on masses of unnecessary, irresponsible pork. A truly heavy political lift, like fixing Medicare or restraining the deficit, requires national attention and the kind of political support that can come only if both parties feel they have something to gain from success.
For Mr. Bush's opponents, one of the great disappointments of this election was the fact that the war in Iraq had little impact on the outcome. The nation is worried about whether the Iraq conflict is going well, but many of the people who wonder whether the president made the wrong choices on that had other interests when they went to the polls: a preference for the president's personality, memories of 9/11 and concern over social issues like gay marriage. While Iraq did not in the end hurt the president's re-election campaign, it has not gone away. Although members of his team campaigned as if Iraq was going very well indeed, they know better. Finding a way out of the morass in Iraq must be the work of all Americans, and on this issue, the president has a real obligation to reach out to the other party. While Democrats may be quietly hoping that Mr. Bush runs into so many problems in the new term that the country will turn back to them in the next election, no partisans are so eager for political gain that they want to see Iraq plunged into an inferno of civil war and terrorism.
Tuesday's vote came as a particular shock in places like Europe, where much of the population simply couldn't conceive that people would want to keep Mr. Bush in power. In Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair made two important points to America's angry allies when he spoke about the results. One was that this is the right time for Mr. Bush to reach out to America's traditional allies - and time for the rest of the world to accept that he will be around for the next four years and must be dealt with as the American people's choice. The other is that the critical goal of stability in the Arab world will never be achieved unless the United States throws itself back into the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. Mr. Blair is one Bush supporter who deserves all the election rewards he can get, and this is the one he's desperate for.
For many anti-Bush voters, the wounds of this rancorous campaign will be raw for a long time, and the idea of joining hands with the president will be a nonstarter. And 49 percent of the public expects those in the loyal opposition to continue taking principled stands against the administration. The challenge for them will be to pick their fights wisely.
To us, the central domestic issue of the next term will be the Supreme Court, and Mr. Bush's nomination to replace the seriously ailing Chief Justice William Rehnquist. The president could pick a respected jurist of centrist temperament with a genuine belief in judicial restraint, or he could pick someone in the ultra-extreme school of Justice Antonin Scalia. Mr. Bush's social conservative base will be pressing in one direction, and will no doubt remind him that the election turned heavily on social issues, particularly opposition to abortion and gay marriage.
The evidence in the polling data that these social issues were crucial to Mr. Bush's win - and that the bulk of those infrequent voters who stood in line for hours to vote were evangelicals, not people against the war - is pretty inescapable. But we were struck by the broad majority of voters who told pollsters that they favored a middle approach on these issues: providing gay couples with the right to have some kind of civil unions, and guaranteeing women the right to legal abortions in most, if not all, cases. This page will never give up our commitment to women's right to reproductive choice, as well as full civil rights for people of all sexual orientations. But a leader who was prepared to make political sacrifices in order to stake a claim to that middle ground could be laying the foundation for a new national consensus that might finally bring the nation's social wars to an end.
Mr. Bush could be that leader. He could be the uniter he promised to be, then failed to become, four years ago. He could put an end to a period in national history when too many people go to the polls on Election Day convinced that victory for the other side would mean disaster for the nation. A lot of voters felt that way on Tuesday, and now Mr. Bush has the chance to show them they were wrong.
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November 4, 2004
After Kerry Concedes, Bush Cites 'A Duty to Serve All Americans'By ADAM NAGOURNEY
eorge W. Bush declared victory yesterday in the race for president after a decisive national election that bolstered Republican strength in Congress and led the White House to proclaim that Mr. Bush had won a mandate from the American public for a second term.
Mr. Bush beamed as he stood with Vice President Dick Cheney at a rally in Washington four hours after accepting a concession call at the White House from Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who waged a fierce challenge to unseat him.
"We had a long night - and a great night,'' Mr. Bush said. "The voters turned out in record numbers and delivered an historic victory."
"America has spoken, and I'm humbled by the trust and the confidence of my fellow citizens," he said. "With that trust comes a duty to serve all Americans, and I will do my best to fulfill that duty every day as your president."
In calling the president, Mr. Kerry abandoned a threat to contest the election result in Ohio in deference to a decisive popular vote victory by a man who four years ago won the presidency with less than 50 percent of the popular vote.
"We cannot win this election," Mr. Kerry said somberly to supporters at Faneuil Hall in Boston.
The victory by Mr. Bush amounted to a striking turn in fortunes for the nation's 43rd president, who had at times this year seemed destined to repeat his father's fate of losing a second term because of a weak economy. Instead, he won about 8.7 million more popular votes than he did in 2000 and positioned himself and his party to push through a conservative agenda in Washington over the next four years.
Mr. Bush won 274 electoral votes, 3 more than in 2000, with Iowa (7 votes) and New Mexico (5 votes) not yet officially in his column. Mr. Kerry had 252 votes. Mr. Bush became the first incumbent Republican president since Calvin Coolidge to win a presidential race while gaining seats in the House and in the Senate. The Republicans picked up at least two seats in the House and four in the Senate. While not enough to provide Mr. Bush a veto-proof Congress, the party's surge did result in the defeat of Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the minority leader and one of the most familiar Democratic faces in Washington.
Republican leaders were promising to renew efforts to pass bills that Democrats had blocked, like one permitting drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and another placing caps on awards in liability lawsuits.
Mr. Bush spoke only in the broad terms of what he might do in a second term. But he strongly signaled that he was looking to stabilize the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq to allow American soldiers to return home.
"We will help the emerging democracies of Iraq and Afghanistan so they can grow in strength and defend their freedom, and then our servicemen and women will come home with the honor they have earned," he said.
Mr. Bush's victory appeared to clear the way for a reshuffling of his cabinet, with John Ashcroft, the attorney general, and Tom Ridge, the homeland security secretary, likely to leave for personal reasons, according to administration officials.
Mr. Cheney, in introducing the president at the rally at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center less than a half-mile from the White House, left little doubt about how this White House saw the election, and what it intended to do with it. He said the president had run "forthrightly on a clear agenda for this nation's future, and the nation responded by giving him a mandate."
Mr. Bush's victory was powered in no small part by a huge turnout among evangelical Christians, who may seek a bigger voice in critical White House decisions over the next four years - in particular, Supreme Court nominations that are likely to occupy parts of Mr. Bush's second term.
Mr. Bush, as he did when he won four years ago, made a point in his victory speech of reaching out to Democrats, saying he wanted to unify a country that had been divided not only by the contest with Mr. Kerry, but also by the circumstances of Mr. Bush's victory four years ago.
"I want to speak to every person who voted for my opponent," he said. "To make this nation stronger and better, I will need your support and I will work to earn it. I will do all I can do to deserve your trust. A new term is a new opportunity to reach out to the whole nation. We have one country, one Constitution and one future that binds us."
Mr. Kerry struck a similar tone in his concession speech in Boston - which at 16 minutes lasted 6 minutes longer than Mr. Bush's - though it reprised, if indirectly, some of the criticisms he made of Mr. Bush during the campaign.
"America is in need of unity and longing for a larger measure of compassion," Mr. Kerry said. "I hope President Bush will advance those values in the coming years. I pledge to do my part to try to bridge the partisan divide.
"I know this is a difficult time for my supporters, but I ask you - all of you - to join me in doing this," said Mr. Kerry, whose voice cracked at times in an uncharacteristic display of public emotion.
That said, by any measure, the Bush victory rocked the political landscape in Washington. Aides to both parties said they were doubtful - given the history of the past four years - that the capital was headed for a period of political calm, no matter what the president and Mr. Kerry said in the aftermath of their bitter competition.
"I don't think a 51-49 election is any mandate," Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic National Committee chairman, said in an interview. "George Bush won, and I congratulate him on that. They ran a very effective campaign and he won. They need to be very careful that they now need to govern from the middle in a bipartisan way. This country as we saw in the election is very evenly split."
For much of Tuesday and into yesterday, it seemed as if the election of 2004 was turning into a reprise of the election of 2000, with a series of tight races and some confusion in counting combining to create a night of tumult and uncertainty. At 2:30 yesterday morning, Mr. Kerry's running mate, Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, went to the stage in Boston where Mr. Kerry had hoped to declare victory to say that the Kerry campaign would not concede until all the outstanding votes in Ohio were counted.
Mr. Bush nearly appeared at 4 a.m. yesterday to declare victory in the face of the Kerry campaign threat.
But the situation in Ohio was nowhere near as disputed as it was in Florida four years ago, and Mr. Bush's advisers decided instead to hold off in the hopes that Mr. Kerry would, upon waking, decide the cause was hopeless and concede.
The 2004 election turned out to be different in another way as well. For all the fears of Democrats this year, Ralph Nader drew so few votes that he had no impact on the outcome in any state.
If Republicans were ecstatic at having won a clean victory without the baggage of 2000, Democrats were bereft at what several described as a rout, and there were immediate signs that the party was facing a dark period of intramural battles.
Several Democrats questioned Mr. Kerry's decision to concede without pressing for a full count of the votes in Ohio, warning that it would discourage first-time voters, particularly members of minorities, in future elections. "I understand the need to put it behind him, given the math," said Donna Brazile, who managed Al Gore's 2000 campaign. "But he has an obligation to allow all these votes to be counted."
Tellingly, associates of Mr. Edwards made a point of informing reporters that Mr. Edwards had urged Mr. Kerry not to give up in Ohio so soon, in what some Democrats described as probably the opening shot of - yes - the 2008 campaign. Mr. Edwards is likely to seek his party's nomination and thus is eager not to do anything in the final days of this campaign that could haunt him in 2008.
"He conveyed his point of view and Kerry made his own decision," one Edwards adviser said, adding that Mr. Edwards "was disappointed but made peace with the result."
Democrats resigned themselves to having even less influence in the Senate and the House. In the Senate, Harry Reid of Nevada was moving to take over the minority leadership post being vacated by Mr. Daschle. With the four-seat gain, Republicans will have 55 senators, still 5 short of holding a filibuster-proof margin. But Republicans said they hoped that Democrats would see Mr. Daschle's defeat as a cautionary lesson that would prevent them from trying to use legislative techniques to entangle Republican initiatives.
Mr. McAuliffe and other Democrats tried to put the best face on the defeat, saying that Mr. Kerry was facing a difficult task in trying to unseat a sitting president during wartime. He argued that Mr. Bush was helped by the emergence last weekend of a videotape featuring Osama bin Laden addressing Americans, which reminded voters of the issue - fear of terrorism - that had always been central to Mr. Bush's campaign.
"You've got to remember that he went in with a tough deck of cards," Mr. McAuliffe said of Mr. Kerry.
Still, Democrats seemed as startled as Republicans were delighted by the unlikelihood of the victory. Mr. Bush prevailed despite the legacy of one of the most disputed elections in the nation's history. He overcame polls showing that voters disapproved of his job performance and of the direction in which the country was heading, two measures that typically augur defeat for an incumbent.
Mr. Bush not only won Florida, but he won it by a comfortable margin. He also won the other of the two most contested states, Ohio. He won both states in 2000. Mr. Kerry grabbed New Hampshire from the Republican column, while Mr. Bush yanked New Mexico away from the Democrats.
Mr. Bush was ahead in another state Mr. Gore barely won last time - Iowa - though officials there were recounting the vote.
Mr. Kerry, in his appearance in Boston, sought to erase any doubt about the vote in Ohio, and made clear that he did not want a protracted repeat of the 2000 battle that tore the country apart. "In America, it is vital that every vote count and every vote be counted,'' he said. "But the outcome should be decided by voters - not a protracted legal process."
As his audience listened in near-silence, Mr. Kerry, who had built a campaign around the Bruce Springsteen song "No Surrender" and promised to fight Republicans in a way Democrats never had before, said he had no reservations about abandoning this one, and returning to his post in the United States Senate.
"I would not give up this fight if there was a chance that we would prevail,'' he said.
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Bush Wins White House, Reaches Out to Foes
Wed Nov 3, 5:34 PM ET
By John Whitesides, Political Correspondent
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush (news - web sites) won re-election to a second four-year term over Democratic Sen. John Kerry (news - web sites) on Wednesday and promised deeply divided Americans he would work to earn their support and trust.
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"A new term is a new opportunity to reach out to the whole nation," he said in a victory speech in Washington. "When we come together and work together, there is no limit to the greatness of America."
Speaking directly to supporters of Kerry, Bush said: "I will need your support, and I will work to earn it. I will do all I can to deserve your trust."
Bush clinched victory in a bitter eight-month struggle for the White House when Kerry ended a vote-counting battle in the decisive state of Ohio and conceded. Kerry, who called Bush to offer his concession, later told supporters in Boston's historic Faneuil Hall to "begin the healing."
In a dispute that evoked memories of the prolonged election recount in Florida in 2000, delays in counting provisional and absentee ballots in Ohio had postponed the final outcome of the presidential election for hours.
Ohio's 20 electoral votes were the final hurdle to Bush capturing an Electoral College (news - web sites) majority of 270 votes after a divisive campaign that focused on the war in Iraq (news - web sites), the battle against global terrorism and the economy.
"I would not give up this fight if there was a chance we could prevail," an emotional Kerry said in Boston. "There won't be enough outstanding votes for us to be able to win Ohio, and therefore we cannot win this election."
Bush begins his second term with the daunting challenges of a worsening insurgency in Iraq -- the aftermath of his decision to invade the country in 2003 -- and soaring federal budget deficits.
Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites) said Bush's win by 3.5 million votes over Kerry was "a mandate" for his second term agenda for the future.
Republicans also celebrated expanded majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate in results likely to build on that mandate and ease Bush's conservative agenda in Congress.
Democratic Senate Leader Tom Daschle, the leading spokesman for the party's congressional opposition to Bush for the last four years, lost his re-election bid to Republican John Thune.
Bush captured a majority of the national popular vote, unlike the disputed 2000 election against Democrat Al Gore (news - web sites), winning 51 percent to Kerry's 48 percent.
"Sen. Kerry waged a spirited campaign and he and his supporters can be proud of their efforts," Bush said.
Kerry called Bush on Wednesday morning after meeting with running mate John Edwards (news - web sites) and Sen. Edward Kennedy (news, bio, voting record), his colleague from Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate.
"DESPERATE NEED FOR UNITY"
Kerry said he congratulated Bush and they discussed the country's divisions and "the desperate need for unity, for finding the common ground, coming together. Today I hope that we can begin the healing."
The dispute over uncounted ballots in Ohio had thrown the presidential result into uncertainty, as Kerry's campaign vowed he would not concede until all the outstanding provisional and absentee ballots had been counted while Bush claimed victory.
White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card made a predawn appearance before Bush supporters to say Bush had a "statistically insurmountable" lead in Ohio and had won a majority of the popular vote.
Ohio's Republican Secretary of State Ken Blackwell had estimated as many as 175,000 provisional ballots could be cast, and counties reported as of Wednesday morning that 135,149 had been issued.
Stocks soared on news of the win from Bush, with shares of major U.S. drug and defense companies rising on the expectation those industries would do well under Bush.
Allies like Russian President Vladimir Putin (news - web sites) and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi saw Bush's victory as bolstering the U.S.-declared "war on terror." But some disenchanted Europeans urged Bush to heal transatlantic rifts.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair (news - web sites), Bush's biggest ally in the war in Iraq, said in London the re-election of Bush came at a critical time when the world must unite to fight terrorism and Europe must rebuild its relationship with Bush.
"We must be relentless in our war against terrorism," Blair said. "We should work with President Bush on this agenda."
Republicans will hold 55 of the 100 Senate seats, three more than they now have, and widened their slim majority of the 435-member House in the new 109th Congress, set to convene on Jan. 3.
That will make it easier for Bush to push his conservative agenda through Congress, potentially making his tax cuts permanent and appointing more federal judges including possibly some U.S. Supreme Court (news - web sites) justices.
"With a bigger majority, we can do even more exciting things," said House Majority leader Tom DeLay, a Republican from Texas.
Long voter lines were reported across the United States on Tuesday and few major voting glitches were recorded in the final act of the long campaign.
With 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House, Bush captured 29 states with 274 electoral votes. Kerry won 19 states and the District of Columbia and 252 votes.
Still undecided were Iowa and New Mexico, but only Ohio made either candidate a winner.
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November 3, 2004OP-ED COLUMNIST
Living Poor, Voting RichBy NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
n the aftermath of this civil war that our nation has just fought, one result is clear: the Democratic Party's first priority should be to reconnect with the American heartland.
I'm writing this on tenterhooks on Tuesday, without knowing the election results. But whether John Kerry's supporters are now celebrating or seeking asylum abroad, they should be feeling wretched about the millions of farmers, factory workers and waitresses who ended up voting - utterly against their own interests - for Republican candidates.
One of the Republican Party's major successes over the last few decades has been to persuade many of the working poor to vote for tax breaks for billionaires. Democrats are still effective on bread-and-butter issues like health care, but they come across in much of America as arrogant and out of touch the moment the discussion shifts to values.
"On values, they are really noncompetitive in the heartland," noted Mike Johanns, a Republican who is governor of Nebraska. "This kind of elitist, Eastern approach to the party is just devastating in the Midwest and Western states. It's very difficult for senatorial, Congressional and even local candidates to survive."
In the summer, I was home - too briefly - in Yamhill, Ore., a rural, working-class area where most people would benefit from Democratic policies on taxes and health care. But many of those people disdain Democrats as elitists who empathize with spotted owls rather than loggers.
One problem is the yuppification of the Democratic Party. Thomas Frank, author of the best political book of the year, "What's the Matter With Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America," says that Democratic leaders have been so eager to win over suburban professionals that they have lost touch with blue-collar America.
"There is a very upper-middle-class flavor to liberalism, and that's just bound to rub average people the wrong way," Mr. Frank said. He notes that Republicans have used "culturally powerful but content-free issues" to connect to ordinary voters.
To put it another way, Democrats peddle issues, and Republicans sell values. Consider the four G's: God, guns, gays and grizzlies.
One-third of Americans are evangelical Christians, and many of them perceive Democrats as often contemptuous of their faith. And, frankly, they're often right. Some evangelicals take revenge by smiting Democratic candidates.
Then we have guns, which are such an emotive issue that Idaho's Democratic candidate for the Senate two years ago, Alan Blinken, felt obliged to declare that he owned 24 guns "and I use them all." He still lost.
As for gays, that's a rare wedge issue that Democrats have managed to neutralize in part, along with abortion. Most Americans disapprove of gay marriage but do support some kind of civil unions (just as they oppose "partial birth" abortions but don't want teenage girls to die from coat-hanger abortions).
Finally, grizzlies - a metaphor for the way environmentalism is often perceived in the West as high-handed. When I visited Idaho, people were still enraged over a Clinton proposal to introduce 25 grizzly bears into the wild. It wasn't worth antagonizing most of Idaho over 25 bears.
"The Republicans are smarter," mused Oregon's governor, Ted Kulongoski, a Democrat. "They've created ... these social issues to get the public to stop looking at what's happening to them economically."
"What we once thought - that people would vote in their economic self-interest - is not true, and we Democrats haven't figured out how to deal with that."
Bill Clinton intuitively understood the challenge, and John Edwards seems to as well, perhaps because of their own working-class origins. But the party as a whole is mostly in denial.
To appeal to middle America, Democratic leaders don't need to carry guns to church services and shoot grizzlies on the way. But a starting point would be to shed their inhibitions about talking about faith, and to work more with religious groups.
Otherwise, the Democratic Party's efforts to improve the lives of working-class Americans in the long run will be blocked by the very people the Democrats aim to help.
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