In the special Economist issue “The World in 2006,” US editor John Micklethwait notes the setbacks suffered by President Bush during 2005 — the failure of Social Security privatization, our struggles in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and the DeLay scandals — before offering this ridiculous analysis (sub. required):

As a result, a president who stormed back to power in 2004 with more votes than any previous candidate will spend a good deal of 2006 on the defensive.

Using the number of votes as a metric of electoral success is ridiculous. (Ever heard of population growth?) By more standard metrics such as presidents’ popular vote and Electoral College margins, Bush’s re-election victory was one of the closest in history, as Ron Brownstein pointed out in the Los Angeles Times:

Measured as a share of the popular vote, Bush beat Kerry by just 2.9 percentage points: 51% to 48.1%. That’s the smallest margin of victory for a reelected president since 1828.

The only previous incumbent who won a second term nearly so narrowly was Democrat Woodrow Wilson: In 1916, he beat Republican Charles E. Hughes by 3.1 percentage points. Apart from Truman in 1948 (whose winning margin was 4.5 percentage points), every other president elected to a second term since 1832 has at least doubled the margin that Bush had over Kerry.

In that 1916 election, Wilson won only 277 out of 531 electoral college votes. That makes Wilson the only reelected president in the past century who won with fewer electoral college votes than Bush’s 286.

Measured another way, Bush won 53% of the 538 electoral college votes available this year. Of all the chief executives reelected since the 12th Amendment separated the vote for president and vice president — a group that stretches back to Thomas Jefferson in 1804 — only Wilson (at 52%) won a smaller share of the available electoral college votes.

Not exactly storming back to power. So why does Micklethwait make it sound like the Bush decline was such a surprise? He lost the popular vote in 2000, he barely won it in 2004, his 9/11 popularity boost has finally worn off, and second-term presidents tend to be unpopular. Do the math.