Clay in an anti-Bush book

From the book SORE WINNERS

"By the end, nobody was talking about race. Even though the white runner-up, Clay Aiken, actually outsang him in the final shows, Ruben won American Idol 2 and the series was a populist triumph... But Ruben's victory proved far muddier than Kelly's... His first album, the soulless Soulful, was outsold by Aiken's debut, Measure of a Man, which instantly shot to number one. Despite finishing second, Clay proved to be the show's de facto winner.

If Clarkson's post-9/11 victory felt like a vote for Bush, Aiken's enormous popularity became something of a public uprising. In a show designed to manufacture a pop idol, the ungainly Clay - who got a makeover deep into the series - was so resolutely unmanufactured that something amazing happened: He was carried aloft by an audience that genuinely cared whether he won. A moment of commercial pop culture suddenly took on a huge emotional dimension. And inspired controversy: Not only did some fans think Clay had been unfairly torpedoed by [certain speculations], the final tally was so close and so ineptly explained that some viewers began claiming that Fox had tampered with the results. You kept waiting for Katerine Harris to show up to certify the vote. The belief that Aiken was robbed in the contest's finale spawned gigabytes of Internet recrimination and debate, even prompting the creation of a People's Republic of Clay website, where his devotees could express their passion. As a friend joked, the only difference between the 2000 election controversy and the one on American Idol was that Clay Aiken's supporters really did like their man."