What Bush seems to posess is an ability to connect personally with his base. This goes beyond policy, fact or ideas. His cleverness is in his ability to exploit this talent. Many dicatators have had this ability such as the Perons in South America, even Saddam amoung his Sunni supporters. Hitler was obviously a magnetic performer whose personality seemed to eclipse his negative ideology.

Bush was apparently popular in his fraternity at Yale, the go-to guy if you wanted liquor or girls or whatever. They called him Bushtail since he was so busy.

He is able to project a kind of sincerity that goes beyond what he actually says. He has been able to exploit the anti-intellectualism that is now prevalent in some segments American society by making fun of it.   

He has correctly surmised that many Liberals are intellectual types and many on college campuses as professors. He has been able to convince his base that the media is somehow Liberal which is the biggest joke of the age. The media is owned by corporate conservatives who now want to force their political views on their media outlets unless it becomes
uneconomical to do so. The head of Viacom for example is voting Bush because he feels that this will help his company's bottom line.

Bush does have the blessing of the rich corporate owners and lobbyists which is clever on his part. I suspect that much of his cleverness can be attributed however to Karl Rove, the inheritor
of Lee Atwater and his dirty tricks campaigns.

Rove has been cited as "Bush's Brain".

Frank