"Kerry is weak" - and to some extent he ran a campaign that was - trumped the fact of his military service.

"Bush is strong" was played very effectively. It was pure theatre, nand pure lies. But it was reassuring theatre that the marks wanted to hear, and enough of them bought it to swing the outcome.

It's well known that one of the things that makes the Left weak is that it's very bad at crafting simple, solid narratives. There's always plurality, argument, a lot of one-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand.

Even now in the US, what does Hillary really stand for? What does Obama stand for? What's their narrative in a single sentence?

Compared to them, everyone knows exactly what the Right stands for. And even though the ideal has been so badly tarnished by scandal that there's a backlash, people know what the ideal is - so much so that the Left still spends a lot of its time trying to demolish the talking points one by one.

Narrative and mythology are what move people. Truth is just an occasional accessory to the fact.