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Well, President Bush played that card in a risky manner if your assessment is correct. The 2004 election wasn't exactly a landslide, but now that W has 3 more years I hope that the war is fought in a manner to win it and the borders are controlled in a more fierce fashion.

Risky? Yes, I agree. I think that the US is beginning to close the Iraq borders as they did around the Iraqi elections. Bush is beginning to fight for public opinion too. We should be seeing soon more info about Alqeada ties to Saddam and maybe some more on WMD too.

The flypaper strategy worked well coupled with the Arab notion that although the US has technical superiority its soldiers can't fight man-to-man. We train our soldiers to shoot well. The terrorists were given their weapons with little target practice. We creamed them and they left the battlefield littered with dead with cell phones and laptops which get turned over to our intel.

Well, President Bush played that card in a risky manner if your assessment is correct.
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This is America. There are always elections two and four years (or less) from now. If you want to have a policy that will take six, eight, twenty years to reap the rewards, you have to deal with it.
Playing it safe doesn't get you anywhere in the long run.
Clinton was obsessed with polls and tried to tailor everything he did to maximize his standings in the polls. Which means he didn't accomplish anything, except run a public relations campaign telling the American people what a great job he was doing.
If he had decided to do what he believed was right, his short-term popularity might have suffered, but he could have had a legacy, something he so ardently desires now.
Of course Clinton has no understanding of the concept of right and wrong, so trying to explain this to him would be like telling a blind man how blue the sky is.