One of the enduring legacies of George W. Bush's magic-realist foreign policy was the discrediting of the word "freedom." The failure of Bush's "Freedom Agenda" made democracy promotion seem like a particularly inexcusable form of naiveté. Didn't he understand that elections are not democracy? Candidate Barack Obama seized on this self-evident proposition to belabor Bush. "We do need to stand for democracy," Obama declared in a 2007 speech. "But democracy is about more than a ballot box." FDR, he noted, hadn't even included voting in his famous 1942 "Four Freedoms" speech.
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