I think his election reveals a great deal about how elections in the US and elsewhere have little to do with candidates or political philosophy and everything to do with marketing. How else to explain that in one generation Americans elected both Ronald Regan and Jimmy Carter? The party that does the best job of marketing is the party that gets elected.

As the 2000 election approached and the Republican strategists contemplated the incredible popularity of Bill Clinton they decided they needed their own good-old-boy from the South who could talk like an ordinary person and who "felt their pain".

Bush wasn't southerner, but he'd learned how to talk like one. He wasn't a dumb guy either, but he learned how to act like one. (If you think that the Bush you see now is the real Bush, go back and listen to the gubernatorial debates between him and Ann Richards. You'll hear a Bush who is articulate, thoughtful and who easily constructs logical, complex English sentences. Nothing like the Bush you see today.)

I think the Republican strategists even went so far as to carefully but quietly publicize Bush's human failings: drugs and alcohol, draft evasion and all the rest. It just made him seem not like the lucky boy born with a silver spoon in his mouth but an ordinary guy with problems and failures just like you and me.

Marketing gentlemen. That's all it was, marketing.