Barely 48 hours before U.S. voters would go to the polls on Nov. 3, 1992, to choose a president, White House press secretary Marlin Fitzwater and Bob Teeter, the incumbent president’s campaign chairman, faced the unhappy task of informing President George Bush that, based upon polling data and their informed judgment, he would lose re-election the following Tuesday to Democrat Bill Clinton.

President Bush refused to accept the bad news from his two aides. He, the youngest Navy combat pilot of World War II, knew better. He was more than confident, he was certain because his youthful opponent had done everything to avoid the military draft during the Vietnam War short of joining the University of Arkansas ROTC band. American voters would never elect Bill Clinton to be the nation’s commander in chief

George Bush was both right and wrong. On Tuesday, he did lose to Bill Clinton, but the voters did not hire Clinton as commander in chief. Because following the implosion of the Soviet Union, the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, American voters in 1992 were not even in the market for a service-tested, militarily plausible commander in chief. Instead, in a year when a majority of Americans, for the very first time, were telling pollsters that they feared that their children’s lives would not be as bright as their own had been, voters wanted a president who both understood the difficult times they were enduring and someone they believed would be able to bring positive change. In 1992, that was Democrat Bill Clinton.

From Franklin Roosevelt through George Bush, each and every president had to first convince voters that he could be commander in chief. FDR, following Pearl Harbor, became Doctor Win the War. Harry Truman compiled a heroic record as an Army captain in World War I combat. Ike was one of only two human beings in a thousand years to lead a successful cross-channel invasion of the European continent.

John Kennedy bore the scars of battle from service as a young PT-boat commander in the Pacific. Richard Nixon and Gerry Ford were both World War II naval officers. Jimmy Carter, too young for the war, graduated from Annapolis and spent years as a naval officer aboard submarines. Ronald Reagan, before he made training films on the back lot of Paramount, served in the Army cavalry. Each man met the commander-in-chief test.

In 1996, the Cold War was still over. America was economically and militarily dominant in a world without serious threat or competitor. U.S. voters were not “interviewing” that year for a commander in chief. Bob Dole, the last nominee of World War II’s Greatest Generation, lost the veterans vote and the nation to Bill Clinton.

By 2000, voters overlooked or ignored that Republican George W. Bush had reportedly relied upon family influence to secure for himself a scarce stateside slot in the Texas Air National Guard rather than serve in Vietnam as his Democratic opponent, Al Gore, had done. In that election, commander in chief was not on the voters’ radar. They were interested, after the embarrassment of presidential scandals, in a change of leadership.

In 2000, Al Gore in defeat won more votes than any U.S. president had ever won except Ronald Reagan in 1984. George W. Bush came to office leading a party that lost seats in the House and the Senate, and with neither a mandate nor a mission. In the words of Democrat Geoff Garin, George W. Bush began the year 2001 as a question mark and ended the year as an exclamation point.

Prior to Sept. 11, George W. Bush, according to pollster John Zogby, was widely viewed as a privileged son of a powerful family who had been born with a golden spoon and been spared most of life’s hard knocks. Sept. 11 was “George W. Bush’s PT-boat experience,” says Zogby. Bush was seen surviving adversity and prevailing. He has become, as FDR did after Pearl Harbor, to most people a convincing commander in chief.

As for Democrats already dispirited by Bush’s 80 percent-plus favorable job-ratings, I have seen more happier faces in Dr. Jack Kevorkian’s van. Among the possible Bush challengers in 2004 other than Gore, only Sens. Tom Daschle, D-S.D., and John Kerry, D-Mass., are veterans, and only Kerry served in combat in Vietnam. Sens. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn.; Joe Biden, D-Del.; and John Edwards, D-N.C., are all non-vets, which does not disqualify them from becoming a convincing commander in chief but makes their struggle that much more uphill if the war is still with us in 2004.

After three successive presidential elections when military credentials appeared to never even enter the voting equation, we could be headed back to the 1941-1991 presidential model, when before you could be president, you had first to be a credible commander in chief.

Mark Shields is a columnist for Creators Syndicate.