FOUR YEARS ago, when I covered the last US presidential election campaign, it was hard to be impressed with George W. Bush. He seemed a callow sort, propelled effortlessly towards the presidency by a combination of heredity and money, swagger and bonhomie.

It didn’t matter that he couldn’t name the President of Chechnya. It was more troubling that he could not really say why he wanted to be American President at all.

I would certainly have preferred the Republican senator John McCain, one of the few men I have met for whom I would be prepared to leap in front of a flying bullet. If he had not been such an insufferable prig, I might even have preferred Al Gore. But those were fat, happy, complacent times. The election was about nothing; who cared who won? Having an aimless, shiftless president seemed somehow appropriate.

There have been many times in the past four years when that initial judgment on Mr Bush seemed vindicated. His economic policies have been stunningly reckless. It was right to respond to the collapse of the 1990s bubble by easing fiscal policy; but Mr Bush’s approach was precisely the wrong way round. It has jeopardised the nation’s long-term fiscal health, while doing little to provide immediate economic stimulus.

His easy abandonment of free trade principle over steel tariffs and farm subsidies was a disturbing glimpse of political opportunism at work. He has happily signed every spending Bill that has been presented to him, making him the most fiscally incontinent leader in living memory.

His governing approach is secretive and overweening. That the War on Terror requires constraints on the liberties that Americans have long enjoyed is without question. But Mr Bush has been too ready for my taste to abandon the most basic civil protections on some pretty flimsy grounds.

In Iraq the catalogue of errors his Administration has made is a serious count against his re-election. The US did not plan, it seems, in any meaningful way for the challenge of running an ethnically diverse foreign country 8,000 miles away in a volatile region with little experience of self-rule and an unhappy history of foreign intervention. It did not send enough forces to pacify and secure the country. It stumbled from one grave error to another in constructing an occupying administration. It did not provide enough resources for the task of reconstruction. The one thing America should surely have done in the days after the fall of Saddam was to shower the Iraqi people with money.

The reason for all these misjudgments is the biggest indictment of all: a set of absurdly over-optimistic assumptions about the postwar situation. Summed up, they went like this. The Iraqis will love us and the freedom we will bring; the world will flock to help us when we uncover the weapons of mass destruction; and the country will rebuild itself with billions of dollars in oil revenues. All nice possibilities in an ideal world. Nobody seemed to prepare for the slight chance that they might not happen.

But for all this, if I had a vote on Tuesday I would be voting to re-elect President Bush.

It is partly Mr Bush’s character. The perils of war really do demand leadership and moral clarity. It is partly, to be honest, the quality of his opponent. The more you see of John Kerry the more troubling the thought of his presidency becomes. Behind a lifetime of careful, calculated decision-making it is clear that he harbours a deep suspicion about the very idea of moral clarity in foreign policy.

It is partly what Mr Bush has done. Afghanistan is an infinitely better and less threatening place today than it was four years ago. Iraq, despite the catalogue of errors, is still heading that way.

But above all, in this oppositional sort of age, when it is often easier to be defined by what one is against rather than what one is for, I have to say it is his enemies who most justify Mr Bush’s re-election.

The list of those whose world could be truly rocked on Tuesday is just too long and too rich to be ignored. If you think for a moment about those who would really be upset by a second Bush term, it becomes a lot easier to stomach.

The hordes of the bien-pensant Left in the universities and the media, the sort of liberals who tolerate everything except those who disagree with them. Secularist elites who disdain religiosity except when it comes from Muslim fanatics. Europhile Brits who drip contempt for everything their country has ever done and long for its disappearance into a Greater Europe.Absurd, isolationist conservatives in America and Britain who think the struggles for freedom are always someone else’s fight. Hollywood sybarites and narcissists, self-appointed arbiters of a nation’s morals.

Soft-headed Europeans who think engagement and dialogue with mass murderers is the way to achieve lasting peace. French intellectuals for whom nothing has gone right in the world since 1789.

The United Nations, which, if it had its multilateral way, would still be faithfully minding a world in which half the population lived under or in fear of Soviet aggression. Most of Belgium.

Above all, of course, Middle Eastern militants. If your bitterest enemies are the sort of people who hack the heads off unarmed, innocent civilians, then I would say you are probably doing something right.

This may sound petty. It is not. This constellation of individuals, parties and institutions has very little in common other than the fact that it has contrived to be wrong on just about every important issue of my adult lifetime.

And so, perhaps for the wrong reasons, perhaps less because he has been right and more because those who hate him so much have been so wrong, I want this President re-elected.

Go on America. Make Their Day.

gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk

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