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The aftermath befitted the morrow of a civil war. Tens of thousands of Americans visited the website of the Canadian immigration service to learn how they could take themselves into exile. A Florida psychotherapist reported treating more than a dozen people for sudden depression. “Hard times, brutish times, lie ahead,” intoned the New Republic.

The New York Times turned its op-ed page into a kind of wailing wall, where a procession of mourners poured forth their laments and imprecations. Garry Wills: “We now resemble [Europe] less than we do our putative enemies . . . al Qaeda [and] Saddam Hussein's Sunni loyalists.” Thomas Friedman: The Bush people “have used . . . religious energy to promote divisions and intolerance at home and abroad.” Maureen Dowd: “jihad in America. . . . One party controls all power. . . . One nation dominates the world.”

The proverbial visitor from afar might have been astonished to learn that all of this rhetorical tearing of hair and rending of garments was occasioned by nothing more than the results of a presidential election, and not even the wailers themselves could have doubted that this election would be followed by another four years hence. Clearly something else was going on.

To be sure, George W. Bush was hated. He had been the object of a startling amount of contumely during his first term of office, a phenomenon that had already occasioned much comment in the public prints. Some of this strong sentiment was presumably due to the taint of illegitimacy that had attached to his victory in the 2000 election. Leaving aside the contested, court-ordered outcome of the vote-counting in Florida, Bush had received fewer votes nationally than his opponent and had acceded to the presidency thanks only to an anachronism in our political system. Although this had happened twice before in our history, the last time was in the 19th century, and to many it appeared excruciatingly unfair, not to mention undemocratic.

But in November 2004, the fact that Bush's second term would now be legitimate beyond any doubt seemed only to compound the hatred. Several of the President's detractors hastened to suggest that his relatively narrow margin of victory—amounting to 3 percent of the popular vote—should not be taken as a “mandate.” Whether they would have said the same had Bush's Democratic opponent won by a like amount is doubtful.

The New York Times, for example, has regularly questioned the presence of a mandate in recent elections—but only when the winner has been a Republican. In 1980, when Ronald Reagan bested incumbent President Jimmy Carter by 10 percentage points, the paper's editors observed that his “mandate,” a word they themselves put in suspicion-arousing quotation marks, had “little policy content,” a position they reiterated four years later when Reagan won reelection over Walter Mondale by a whopping 18 percentage points (a “lonely landslide” and “a personal victory with little precise policy mandate”). Nor could the 8-point victory by Bush's father over Michael Dukakis “fairly be called a mandate,” asserted the paper in 1988.

Whenever a Democrat has won, by contrast, the Times has perceived things differently. After Bill Clinton's first victory (by 6 percentage points) in 1992, the editors commented: “The test now will be how quickly President-elect Clinton can convert his mandate into momentum.” When he won reelection (by 8 points) in 1996, it repeated the thought—“There can be no question about his mandate”—and added a little civics lesson: “The American people express their clearest opinion about what they want government to do through their choice of chief executive.”

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II

Even as the Democrats and their friends in the mainstream media minimized the import of Bush's victory in 2004, it seems likely that their pained response was due precisely to the fact that the Republican victory, if not deep, was undeniably broad. In addition to winning the presidency with an absolute majority of the popular vote (something no Democrat has achieved since Lyndon Johnson in 1964), the Republicans solidified their majorities in the Senate and the House of Representatives. This will be the sixth successive Congress since 1994 in which the Republicans will have controlled both houses.

Nor is the pattern likely to be broken in the short term. Republicans now hold a 30-vote margin in the House; since the advantage of incumbency usually results in to the victory of more than 90 percent of those standing for reelection, this will not be easy to reverse. In the Senate, the Republicans hold a ten-vote edge. There, reelection is a less sure thing, but in the midterm election of 2006 more incumbent Democrats are thought to be at risk than Republicans. Meanwhile, the GOP continues to enjoy a lead of 29 to 21 in governorships, including those of the four most populous states: California, Texas, New York, and Florida.

As if all this were not unnerving enough, the Republicans won in a year when many things had seemed promising for Democrats. The war in Iraq was proving to be much tougher sledding than originally hoped, and throughout the year Bush was buffeted by unfavorable headlines—a mounting insurgency, intelligence failures about weapons of mass destruction, prisoner abuse, the withdrawal of allies, and more. Although it is supposedly difficult to oust a sitting President in wartime, both Johnson and Harry S. Truman, two incumbents saddled with wars on distant shores that were not going well, declined to seek reelection, presumably in part out of fear they would not win. Nor was the news from the home front particularly good for Bush. The economy was recovering from recession, but the rebound was weak, generating few jobs and no more than guarded optimism.

Adding to the pre-election expectations—and post-election frustrations—of Democrats and liberals was their low regard for the man who beat them. Howell Raines, the former executive editor of the Times, had captured this sentiment in a pre-election essay: “There are signs of the fierce conviction of some voters—and the secret fear of a quieter and perhaps larger group—that George W. Bush is not smart enough to continue as President.” One of these voters apparently was John F. Kerry, who vented to an aide within earshot of an “embedded” Newsweek correspondent: “I can't believe I'm losing to this idiot.” By contrast, most Democrats felt, with reason, that unlike Mondale or Dukakis or Al Gore before him, Kerry had proved to be an effective, if uncharismatic, campaigner.

Other political factors appeared to be breaking in favor of the Democrats as well. Only two weeks before the election, these were summed up by the Democratic strategist James Carville:

If we can't win this damn election, with a Democratic party more unified than ever before, with us having raised as much money as the Republicans, with 55 percent of the country believing [the U.S. is] heading in the wrong direction, with our candidate having won all three debates, and with our side being more passionate about the outcome than theirs—if we can't win this one, then we can't win [anything]!

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III

Carville's enumeration of Democratic advantages left out an important one—the palpable tilt toward Kerry on the part of the mainstream press. In October, the political director of ABC News—inspired, he said, by the New York Times—sent a memo to the network staff exhorting them not to be strictly evenhanded with respect to the two campaigns:

We have a responsibility to hold both sides accountable to the public interest, but that doesn't mean we reflexively and artificially hold both sides “equally” accountable when the facts don't warrant that.

I'm sure many of you have this week felt the stepped-up Bush efforts to complain about our coverage. This is all part of their efforts to get away with as much as possible with the stepped-up, renewed efforts to win the election by destroying Senator Kerry at least partly through distortions.

It's up to Kerry to defend himself, of course. But as one of the few news organizations with the skill and strength to help voters evaluate what the candidates are saying [we have a duty] to serve the public interest. Now is the time for all of us to step up and do that right.

Around the dial from ABC at CBS, an edition of the magazine show 60 Minutes, presented by star anchor Dan Rather, revealed hitherto secret documents showing that Bush had been truant from his National Guard duties as a young man and had benefited from favoritism. Within a couple of days, most news organizations, goaded by alert bloggers, recognized that these were clumsy forgeries; they turned out to have been furnished to the network by a well-known Bush-hating crank. Although CBS and Rather belatedly and grudgingly acknowledged their error, the network was not done. Eager for a second bite at the apple of electoral influence, 60 Minutes planned a bombshell for the Sunday night before election Tuesday, a slot that would leave no time for the facts to catch up with a dubious story.

This time, the network was going to expose the ultimate example of dereliction in handling the occupation of Iraq, namely, that the administration had allowed 377 tons of extremely high explosives, useful for detonating a nuclear bomb, to disappear. In the event, however, the New York Times scooped CBS, running the story on its front page a week earlier. Subsequent polls showed that this story did swing some votes to Kerry, but not as many as it might have done had there been less time to rebut it.¹

This was but one of several stories in which the Times revealed its slant on the election. The paper's “public editor,” Daniel Okrent, denied any such bias; he published two counterbalanced critiques of the paper, one complaining that it favored Kerry, the other that it favored Bush. To make the latter case, Okrent found Todd Gitlin, an unreconstructed leftist and former head of the 1960's radical group, Students for a Democratic Society.

Gitlin's argument was absurd, as was the equation of critics from the Left and the Right. The Times fervently backed Kerry in its editorials, and almost all of the paper's correspondents are Democrats. A clearer reflection of the paper's attitude could be seen in an op-ed by Howell Raines, whose imprint was still evident even after his 2003 departure as executive editor. “If George Bush wins the presidential election,” wrote Raines in the St. Petersburg Times, “Americans can mark it down as a triumph of thug politics.”

In a similar vein, Newsweek “reported” after the election that the outcome had validated Karl Rove's strategy “even if it turns [the] country into a battle zone, and validates smash-mouth politics for a generation.” And the Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne asserted: “The fervent opposition to President Bush is rational, and its intensity is a direct response to Bush's own efforts to discredit all opposition to his policies.” But these indignant comments on Bush's tactics only revealed partisan blinders, for exit polling showed that a plurality of voters believed it was Kerry, not Bush, who had attacked his opponent unfairly.

Nor is the evidence of media bias only impressionistic. A study of coverage during two weeks in October by the non-partisan Project for Excellence in Journalism found (according to a report in the trade journal Editor & Publisher) that “59 percent of stories that were mainly about Bush told a mainly negative story, while 25 percent of Kerry stories played out that way. One in three stories about Kerry were positive, one in seven for Bush.”

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