He had the hair, the height and a war hero's gravitas. He ran with a sunshine boy and had Michael Moore and the French behind him. He lost, the pundits said, in good measure because too many voters didn't believe he would do the best job of thwarting another terrorist attack. "Our fight goes on," Kerry intoned in his concession speech. For now, it's back to his old job as the junior Senator from Massachusetts.
For sticking to his guns (literally and figuratively), for reshaping the rules of politics to fit his ten-gallon-hat leadership style and for persuading a majority of voters that he deserved to be in the White House for another four years, George W. Bush is TIME's 2004 Person of the Year