Reply #1: Very, very telling: [View All]

[beachmom]

As a follow-up, Solomon primed one group of subjects to think about death, a state of mind called "mortality salience." A second group was primed to think about 9/11. And a third was induced to think about pain—something unpleasant but non-deadly. When people were in a benign state of mind, they tended to oppose Bush and his policies in Iraq. But after thinking about either death or 9/11, they tended to favor him. Such findings were further corroborated by Cornell sociologist Robert Willer, who found that whenever the color-coded terror alert level was raised, support for Bush increased significantly, not only on domestic security but also in unrelated domains, such as the economy.




I think that this paragraph is in a nutshell why Bush won. The Swift Boat stuff was to make sure people wouldn't think JK was their hero who'd save them. But I still think they got far more bang for their buck with the terror alerts, with OBL's appearance at the end, the final terror alert.