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Michael Moore's most recent film, the massively successful Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), is a savage and sustained attack on George W. Bush and his decision to go to war in Iraq. Moore made it clear from the beginning that Fahrenheit 9/11 was an anti-Bush film aimed squarely at the US electorate (in particular, the large proportion of undecided voters), with the express purpose of persuading them to oust President Bush from The White House at the US election on Tuesday 2 November 2004.
However, the best intentions of Moore did not affect the voting patterns of Americans on polling day. George W. Bush won the US election with a clear majority of the vote (about fifty-one per cent), and was re-elected for a second term with eight million more votes than he received in the 2000 election.1
This makes Bush the first President to win with a clear majority since his father George Bush Senior defeated Michael Dukakis in 1988. Bush also won a mandate to govern (which he couldn't claim before the election), receiving 3.5 million more votes than his Democratic opponent John Kerry. In addition, Bush became the first president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936 to be re-elected while gaining seats in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.2
Like Moore's previous film, Bowling For Columbine (2002) - a film about the gun culture in the US that centred on the Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colorado on 20 April, 1999 - Fahrenheit 9/11 has also had its fair share of controversy. Even before Fahrenheit 9/11 was released, there were problems with distribution due to its strident anti-Bush stance.
Significantly, some critics have gone as far as to suggest that the relentless anti-Bush stance taken by Moore in Fahrenheit 9/11 could have been off-putting to some viewers (and undecided voters), and may have even benefited Bush on polling day.
The title Fahrenheit 9/11 is a reference to a novel by English writer Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, which is the temperature at which books burn. Fahrenheit 451 concerns a society that bans books, and where a powerful, ever-present television tells people what they should be thinking.3 (Fahrenheit 451 was also made into a film of the same name in 1966, starring...