Washington ? Who says there’s never anything new under the sun? A decade ago, a chief executive named Bush led the nation into war, vanquishing a well-armed foe and leaving the Democrats so quaking in fear of the president’s political prowess that the party’s big names decided not to run for president. Now a new President Bush is girding for war — and the Democrats are flocking to run against him.

It’s all the more curious because of the parallels between the two times. The economy is in upheaval. The military foe is Iraq. The focus of American politics is on foreign policy.

But here’s a case where history doesn’t establish a pattern but, instead, explains why the present is so different from the past. Or, put another way: The fact that the Democrats left the field open to the unknown governor of Arkansas in 1991 — and then let him capitalize on the economic woes of 1992 — is luring candidate after candidate into the presidential waters in 2003.

One of them, of course, is Rep. Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, the former House minority leader who in July 1991 stood down from the presidential race by issuing a statement saying that he wanted to spend the next year “helping to shape, define and advance the Democratic message.” He issued another statement over the weekend, saying much the same thing in explaining why he would run for president this time.

Among the others who rushed to exit the 1992 race were Gov. Mario M. Cuomo of New York, Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey, Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia — and Sen. Al Gore of Tennessee. “My family — my wife and four young children — are more important than politics and personal ambition,” said Gore, who was 43 years old at the time. His 8-year-old son had been seriously hurt in an automobile accident in 1989.

This is a different time. Monday, when Gephardt took formal steps to join the 2004 race, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 8,773. It closed at 2,979 the day Gephardt stood down in 1991. The prime rate Monday was 4.25 percent. The prime rate in 1991 was 8.5 percent. CDs, which to most people in 1991 didn’t mean a disc that played music, were at 5.9 percent for a six-month period. Certificates of deposit were going Monday for 1.34 percent for six months.

The Democrats aren’t turning away from a race this year. Right now it doesn’t look like a campaign. It looks like a parade.

Many of the Democrats who would be president know that their senior colleagues regretted their decision to shy away from the 1992 race, where Gov. Bill Clinton streaked to victory even though he won neither the Iowa caucuses (favorite son Tom Harkin took them) nor the New Hampshire primary (captured by former Sen. Paul E. Tsongas of neighboring Massachusetts).

Indeed, as Democratic giant after Democratic giant stood aside in 1991, Clinton’s confidence rose. “Clinton had a different sense of the timing altogether,” said Paul Begala, a Clinton confidant at the time. “The heavyweights were dropping out. He kept saying: All the better for me. He was sure 1992 was his time. He kept saying that the issues of his life were front and center.”

One of the principal developments that cheered the Clinton forces, largely forgotten today: The withdrawal of Gov. L. Douglas Wilder of Virginia. Wilder, an African-American, scared Clinton more than Tsongas or Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska. Clinton calculated from the start that the key to the Democratic nomination in 1992 was black voters in the South. With Wilder gone, so was the biggest obstacle to the Clinton nomination.

Now, with such a crowded field, it’s difficult for any of the contenders to see a clear path to the nomination.

But each has a theory anyway: Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, is fluent in national security matters and thus believes he can hold his own in a debate with Bush on world affairs. Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, a sweet-speaking Southerner, knows that since the election of John F. Kennedy, the Democrats have sent only Southerners to the White House. Gephardt, who is close to organized labor (the religious right of the left), thinks his economic populism will strike a chord. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, who was the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee in 2000, thinks he retains enormous good will from his first national campaign. And former Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont, who has been toiling in frosty obscurity in Montpelier, is arguably better known in January 2003 than Jimmy Carter was known in January 1975.

But most of all, these men believe that Bush the son is less nimble than Bush the father, that the current President Bush is an accidental president, and that the chances that United States will go through the next year unscathed by war, terror or recession are slim.

“There’s a sense of the first President Bush having run a very tough race, very negative — some would say mean and over the top,” said Bill Carrick, a longtime adviser to Gephardt and one of the principals involved in his decisions in 1991 and 2003. “People saw (Bush) 17 points behind (Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts) and coming back and winning. They decided he was a formidable politician. They don’t feel that way about the son.” History, alas, is not repeating itself.

David Shribman is a columnist for The Boston Globe.