He forced the world into a war that nobody wanted using specious arguments. He divided the West in a war against Islamic terrorists that can only be won together. He annulled laws where he saw fit. He deceived millions with a war launched for false reasons. And all of this despite the values of freedom and moral superiority the USA believed in. He wrote a check to his country's super rich through generous tax cuts and, at the same time, paid back the rest of Americans by transforming billions in budget surpluses into a deficit of unimagined proportions that will haunt the country for years. He aligned himself with the country's conservative religious leaders who think of abortion as a capital crime and homosexuality as a serious sin. He polarized Americans in a ways seldom seen before. So why, in God's name, would such a president get re-elected?

The polls more or less predicted the outcome. On the day before the election, most had the incumbent leading with a slight advantage over his challenger. But most observers, including SPIEGEL ONLINE, thought the unloved president would lose the election. He was supposed to lose because newly mobilized voters would prefer Kerry. He was supposed to lose because the Democrats had formed a previously non-existent grass roots movement with the help of the Internet, telephone chains and simple visits to potential voters' homes. Billionaires like finance magnate George Soros and other celebrities donated tens of millions of dollars, along with the small contributions of thousands of party loyalists -- filling an election war chest to levels never seen before. His success seemed inevitable. More than anything, Bush had to lose because a victory for such a man was unimaginable.

But the outcome was different. The first signs of it came when, instead of what many expected to be a chaotic election, a relatively orderly vote took place. There were no long, drawn out affairs or protracted quarrelling between lawyers and courts. Then came the first results -- and they were surprisingly clear. Never before had so many American people voted for their president (never before had so many voted for the challenger, either). Even with razor-thin margins in some states, Bush had collected the most votes -- by far. In doing so, he took the legitimacy out of any legal offensive the challenger could bring.

So why does his election come as a surprise?

Most underestimated how idiosyncratic Americans really are. What was it that concealed those differences from Europeans (or the editorialists at America's East Coast newspapers, for that matter)? Was it the decades-long united front in the Cold War? Was it Paul Auster or Hollywood? America is a strange country with its own values -- and that can't be changed by the fact that you can have a great conversation in a bar with people in New York, San Francisco or Washington.

They underestimated the degree in these angst-ridden times to which the Americans yearn for a leader who speaks with clear language, clear words and offers them a clear path -- and then follows it, even if it later turns out to be wrong. They underestimated how the country can become captivated by simple messages. "Simple but effective," the online magazine Slate wrote, explaining to its readers "why you keep losing to this idiot."

And, yet again, they underestimated the Midwest. Hardly any European (and, indeed, only some of the people in US metropolises) can imagine the tedious, wasteland that exists between Florida and the Dakotas. In this region, the horizon is always straight-ahead, the heavens are like a high ceiling and God is never far away. Bush decisively built his campaign on the pious people who live here. The number of voters who cast their ballots largely based on moral values was far higher than the number who voted based on their fears about terrorism, war or losing their jobs.

"Now, without constraints, Bush can pursue the dreams he campaigned for -- the use of U.S. military might to bring God's gift of freedom to the world," Sidney Blumenthal wrote in the online magazine Salon.com. In the mind of the former Clinton advisor, the transatlantic alliance is history. "The international system of collective security forged in World War II and tempered in the Cold War is a thing of the past ... goodbye to all that."

(Mathias Müller von Blumencron, Washington)

Part Two: Why Bush II Can't Be Like Bush I

Bush II Can't Continue like Bush I

Bush's astonishing victory was filled with contradictions. He won despite the fact that he started the wrong war for the wrong reasons at the wrong time with the wrong strategy. He won despite an enormous federal budget deficit that, in concert with generous tax cuts, disturbed the people even more than the experts. And he won despite the fact that he made far too many concessions to the religious right.

The burden for the new (old) president is also somewhat disquieting: Bush II can't continue to act as Bush I has. The problems demand a change. As the results slowly poured in on Tuesday night, Karen Hughes, who feels and thinks like the president, spoke of a "new attempt at better cooperation." It's the kind of thing we like to hear.

But whether such gestures are just talk or truly represent a real effort to harmonize a divided nation and change an America that is estranged from the world, will emerge in the next few days.

The new "old" president can send a signal of his intentions soon. They will largely be shown through the personnel decisions he makes and who he still wants to have around him. For some time now, a debate has been stewing amongst neo-conservatives over whether their obsession over Saddam Hussein was falsely directed and whether or not their imperial dreams -- in which Iraq was just the first domino in a series of lands -- may have been a fundamental error. If that thinking takes hold, the personnel consequences would have to be that the camarillas in the Pentagon, including their patron Donald Rumsfeld, would no longer belong in the administration. Colin Powell has also hinted he would stay in office under certain conditions -- namely Rumsfeld's exit. Another decisive circumstance will be the degree to which Vice President Dick Cheney is allowed to dominate the administration. It's very possible he won't be allowed to exercise his influence to the same degree he did in the last four years.

As always, everything in America depends on the president. He can, considering the clearly conservative mandate he has been handed by voters, continue to rule from the right, permeating the country with conservatism using the Supreme Court as his tool. That's exactly what the religious right, which saved Bush, will expect of him. At the same time, he could take a self-correcting path and try to politically reconcile a country that has just experienced one of the bitterest elections in its history.

America gives the impression that it's a country suffering from eternal proselytizing. But that's understandable. The United States post-9/11 is a different country. It is agitated and polarized in a way unseen since Vietnam. Its voter turnout is greater that it has been in years. In Europe, 60 percent voter turnout would be a cause for concern. But in the US, it is grounds for satisfaction. This politicization won't end after the election, and it will bring with it a mandate for the president: He must be the president of all Americans, not just half of the country.

(Gerhard Spörl, Washington)

Fascism Lite? Nonsense!

It's actually happened: George W. Bush has been re-elected. Contrary to all recommendations, reminders and warnings from Europe, and here, above all, in the cultural pages of the German newspapers, the Americans have selected a president who is more unloved outside his country than any of his predecessors. For example, about 70 percent of all Germans dislike Bush, and if he had run for election here, he probably would have gotten fewer votes than a Social Democratic candidate in conservative Bavaria.

But what hurts the most is that Bush's victory is so decisive. He not only got three million votes more than Kerry, and with it a full majority both in the popular vote and the electoral college, but he also helped the Republicans increase their majority in both the Senate and Congress. No one can stand up now and say the results don't reflect the will of the voters or that Bush stole the election or that he was named president by the highest court with the help of his brother in Florida. I admit I would have liked to have seen a different result: with Bush winning the popular vote and Kerry in the electoral college -- an exact flip-flop of the 2000 election result. It would have been interesting to see who then cried "unfair," alleged it was "undemocratic" or a "farce"?

At the same time, I also would love to have seen how German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder would have reacted to a President Kerry would have maintained Bush's imperialistic style of foreign policy -- just more politely, in a more jovial tone but also more forcefully. After all, Bush campaigned with the slogan "For a strong America." But Kerry took it a step further, saying "For a stronger America!"

But these "what if" scenarios aside, a huge and magnificent country like the US should be represented by an intellectual and not a "guy," whose only luck in life was to be born rich. Despite this, Bush's election fills me with a certain degree of schadenfreude -- especially towards those colleagues who had already written articles that exhaustively explained why Bush had no chance against Kerry and now have to write exactly the opposite. But hey, life can throw you some curve balls.

But I also felt schadenfreude towards the political fortune tellers, cultural tea leaf readers and hobby soothsayers who take joy out of predicting disasters with the comfort that no one will hold them accountable if their visions don't come true. Ivan Nagel, who fancies himself a tough guy, wrote in the Berliner Zeitung newspaper, "Bush is not Hitler." But in backing up his claim, he argued exactly the opposite. And Wim Wenders, who's more of a softie, told a German talk show host that with Bush, the USA would slide into "totalitarianism." Meanwhile, Richard Sennett declared in the Tagesspiegel that the USA would develop a sort of "soft facism." Since Americans have gotten into "low carb," "fat free," and "sugar free" products, it wasn't hard for him to invent the Fascism Lite label. It's all just as nonsensical as the talk of the "Fourth Reich" after the fall of Germany's Berlin Wall, but it also gives the impression these people are really jonezing for a catastrophe. Basically, Nagel, Wenders and Sennett are telling 120 million Americans that they have no idea what they're doing.

Worse yet, it abandons the basic idea that the voter is sovereign. If the eastern Germans vote for the far-right National Party of Germany or the Party of Democratic Socialism, the successor party to the East German Communists, or the Hungarians vote for post-Communists or the Algerians vote for a fundamentalist party, then they have reasons for doing so -- and they have to be respected.

Nevertheless, the Bush bashing here will continue. Any one who wants to demonstrate their power of political judgement and get the biggest bang for little work just has to say "the cowboy" and grimace as if he's discovered a cockroach in his hamburger. That's all it takes to be considered America-critical and progressive.