Washington ? One story line from the capital: President Bush will have a good war, his economic offensive shows that he will avoid the domestic traps that caught his father, his popularity will remain high, and he’ll roll to a second term in 2004.

But as commanding a presence as Bush has in Washington, the following fact may provide a midwinter chill in the administration: President Bush’s approval rating of 63 percent in the Gallup Poll after two years in office is only 1 percentage point higher than that received by Lyndon B. Johnson at the two-year mark of his presidency. Even so, Johnson, whose ratings had fallen to 46 percent by January 1967, was essentially chased out of office by the spring of 1968, the pressure coming from the very Democratic political figures he so dominated when the election season was gearing up.

Right now the Democrats are trying to calibrate their strategies to the man they are seeking to defeat. Here are three analyses:

l The incumbent president looks doomed — and he is. There are two modern examples of presidencies in peril two years out. The first is 1975, when Gerald R. Ford was still being pummeled for pardoning the disgraced President Richard M. Nixon and when the unemployment rate was a staggering 8.2 percent. The second is four years later, in 1979, when Jimmy Carter, who defeated Ford, was facing economic distress, rising oil prices, and the persistent perception that the president was being rolled by his own presumptive allies in the Congress, then decisively controlled by the Democrats. “We were concerned,” recalls Jody Powell, who was the presidential press secretary, “and we had good reason to be concerned.”

Neither incumbent president was re-elected.

l The prospects for the incumbent president look bright — but they’re an optical illusion. Two recent examples stand out, both involving presidents from Texas. By 1967, Johnson had endured two heartbreaking summers of urban riots and the strengthening of the anti-Vietnam movement, but his success in the Congress was astonishing, the Great Society inspired great hope, and unemployment was at a manageable 3.9 percent (current unemployment rate: 6 percent).

“We thought there were enough people who thought that Johnson had delivered a lot to the country,” says Harry C. McPherson Jr., who at the time was Johnson’s White House counsel.

At this point in the first Bush administration, the Iraq war was just getting under way, a development that would send the president’s approval ratings into the stratosphere. But both presidents lost.

l All’s well and all will end well for the White House. This is the analysis that Team Bush is counting on. It occurred in the 1950s; Dwight D. Eisenhower had an approval rating of 70 percent two years into his first term. It occurred, too, in the 1980s (Ronald Reagan’s re-election was never in doubt, despite the 1982 recession) and in the 1990s (when Bob Dole mounted a feeble challenge to a popular President Bill Clinton).

Right now there are few doubts, on matters foreign, domestic or political, issuing forth from the Bush White House; even if these doubts existed, a disciplined crowd like the Bush team would be unlikely to share them. But there were doubts in the Johnson White House in January 1967. “I never felt comfortable from ’66 on,” says McPherson. “I felt more apprehensive in January 1967 than the Bush people feel in January 2003. But all kinds of things can happen, and happen fast, to drag you down.”

And yet the remarkable thing about the Bush administration is that it is on the offensive, not on the defensive. Last week, it rolled out an economic plan with a public relations strategy that may have no precedent in Washington, where dramatic plans are leaked and then clipped back. This time the administration leaked dramatic plans — the call for a reduction in capital-gains levies on stock dividends is one of the things GOP politicians always talk about but never dare actually put to paper — and then came out with a proposal (for the elimination of those taxes altogether) that was even more dramatic than the leaks.

The maneuver was breathtaking in its audacity — but unmistakable in its meaning. Which is this: The White House is playing a form of political hardball not seen in this city since, well, the Nixon years. It was, for example, Nixon who took the country off the gold standard, and Nixon who imposed wage and price controls (cameo role: Donald H. Rumsfeld) and Nixon who created the opening to China. It was Bush was took every Republican’s fondest tax dream and made it his policy.

The Democrats who are rushing to challenge Bush believe that he is the mirror image of his father, who took no prisoners while he campaigned but who was conciliatory while he governed. They may be right that Bush governs with a strong arm but campaigns with a light touch. But for presidents running for re-election, the distinction between governing and campaigning is often impossible to discern.

That’s why the Democrats can forget the notion that Bush is doomed, hope that his popularity is an optical illusion, and pray that the election doesn’t turn out the be the most recent example of the all’s-well analysis. It all depends, ultimately, on whether all’s well in the world in November 2004.