I'm back now with some new perspectives on the race between Republican President George W. Bush and his Democratic challenger, John Kerry of Massachusetts.

Previously, I believed that another term of Bush in the Oval Office would be bad for the country - and the world. After all, Bush had inherited history's healthiest economy and given it the flu. Jobs gave way to joblessness; the environment resembles the conference room after the annual office party, and lasting peace looks a lot like perpetual war. How much more damage should one man be allowed to inflict on his fellow citizens?

In the almost four years since Bush took over the nation's top job, life has gotten harder for most Americans. To- day, the answer to Ronald Reagan's taunting 1980 question - "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?" - is a resounding, "No." Small wonder the voters sent President Jimmy Carter packing after one term.

Now, 24 years later, an ineffectual incumbent is struggling to survive one of the worst first terms in modern times, and polls have him at even money to win. Since 2000, when Bush was installed as president by a 5-4 Supreme Court decision, the amiable Texan has steered the country into war and recession to the cheers of (almost) 50 percent of the voting-age public.

Sure, he has some unconventional notions, like cutting taxes while driving up the deficit in the middle of a war - the kind of approach his father might have called "voodoo economics."

(What do you suppose the odds are that a geographically massive nation of 270 million people would select not one, but two George Bush's - a father-son team - as president within 16 years? Is Jeb Bush next?)

A new report, "The Separate Realities of Bush and Kerry Supporters" from the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, finds that a majority of Bush supporters believe things about the world that are objectively untrue while the views of a majority of Kerry supporters are grounded in reality.

"For example," the report says, "Bush backers largely think that the president and his policies are popular internationally. Seventy-five percent believe that Iraq was providing 'substantial' aid to al-Qaida, and 63 percent say clear evidence of this has been found." If any one of those is true, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says he can find no evidence to back it up.

An overwhelming 82 percent of Bush supporters - encouraged in their beliefs by the Bush administration itself - think Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or a major WMD program before the United States and its allies invaded.

It is natural for citizens to support their country in war, but the researchers found the magnitude of the reality gap extraordinary in this case. The report concludes that "Bush supporters have succeeded in suppressing awareness of the findings of a whole series of high-profile reports about pre-war Iraq that have been blazoned across the headlines of newspapers throughout the world and prompted extensive, high-profile and agonizing reflection."

Writing in the online magazine Salon ("The Blind Leading the Blind," Oct. 21, 2004) Michelle Goldberg says that the roots of this denial may lie in the trauma of 9/11 and "people's desire to hold on to their image of Bush as a capable protector. It offers no guidance, though, on how ordinary Republicans might be coaxed back to reality."

The article ends with this chilling thought:

"And while 'The Separate Realities of Bush and Kerry Supporters' may be perversely satisfying to Democrats in its confirmation of blue-state prejudices, it carries a pretty disturbing question for all rational Americans: How can arguments based on fact prevail in a nation where so many people know so little?"

© 2004 Cleveland.com