Lyndon Baines Johnson couldn’t do it. Neither could Harry Truman. The last president to run for and win re-election in the midst of an inconclusive war was William McKinley, who in 1900 earned slightly more than 51% of the vote notwithstanding a nasty insurrection in the Philippines.

It seems fitting that President Bush has duplicated McKinley’s feat and even his winning percentage, since campaign tsar Karl Rove has often spoken of his admiration for McKinley and his Karl Rove, Mark Hanna. Rove wants Mr. Bush to usher in an era of Republican dominance just as McKinley and Hanna did. Tuesday’s results, which show the GOP widening its control not only of the White House but also of the House and Senate, bear out his fondest wishes. Bush can only hope that his war turns out as well as McKinley’s did, for, following the 1900 election, U.S. troops succeeded in pacifying the Philippines.

The president’s ability to pull out a solid, if narrow, win, is even more impressive than McKinley’s, considering the formidable forces arrayed against him. Everyone from George Soros to Dan Rather did his best to beat Bush. Even Osama bin Laden got into the act. His bizarre election-eve videotape sounded like a Koranic version of Michael Moore, with its references to the Patriot Act’s “suppression of freedoms,” “election fraud” in Florida, and wars waged on behalf of “mega-corporations like Halliburton.” The No. 1 foe of Bush – and the entire civilized world – ended with a veiled threat that any U.S. states that had the temerity to vote the wrong way would pay the price. “Your security is in your own hands,” al Qaeda’s leader warned. “And every state that doesn’t play with our security, has automatically guaranteed its own security.” Such threats, backed up by bombs, swayed the outcome of the Spanish election. But Australian voters did not knuckle under, and neither did the voters of America.

By re-electing the president with a margin of 3.5 million votes, they sent a thunderous message that America will not be intimidated by Middle Eastern terrorists or Western European hand-wringers as it wages the war on terrorism. Americans are dismayed by the losses and setbacks in Iraq, but they are determined to prevail, and most did not believe that John F. Kerry would have the fortitude to see this bitter conflict through to a victorious conclusion. Kerry may have been the better debater but Bush was judged the better leader.

For Democrats, who had convinced themselves that the current occupant of the White House is the worst leader since Caligula, the results must be inexplicable. For Republicans, nothing can be sweeter than to contemplate how much Maalox must have been swilled on Wednesday morning in bien-pensant precincts from the Left Bank of Paris to the West Side of Los Angeles.

Sorry, Jacques. Sorry, Eminem. You lose.

Once the emotion of the moment passes, however, the president should undertake some serious self-reflection. His electoral victory hardly means that his first term was flawless. While he is on the right track conceptually in the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq, his flawed execution almost cost him re-election.

In his second term, Bush needs to do a much better job of defending and explaining his management of the war. His inarticulateness in the first presidential debate, which propelled Kerry back into the race, was symptomatic of a broader failure to communicate. To rally a broad coalition behind his leadership, at home and abroad, he needs to pick up his game.

A downside of the resounding Republican victory is that there will be no effective voice in the political process for the 48% of American voters – and the roughly 98% of non-Americans – who are skeptical of Bush’s policies. The president could ignore the doubters, as he did in his first term, but it would be wiser to bring them into the tent by appointing a prominent Democrat to his war Cabinet.

Senator Kerry was set to pick Senator Biden as his secretary of state; Mr. Bush should pick Mr. Biden, or someone similar, himself. And then he needs to hold his subordinates accountable for their mistakes, something that didn’t happen in the past four years as they lurched from one blunder to another, from nonexistent weapons of mass destruction to all-too-real abuses at Abu Ghraib.

If Mr. Bush wants to leave a lasting Republican majority, he needs to use his second term to address some of the shortcomings of the first.

Mr. Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Times, where this first appeared.