Two truths, each discomforting, are dawning on the Democrats as they gird for this autumn’s presidential elections.

The first is that the election is not about John F. Kerry but about George W. Bush. The second is that the best recipe for Democratic success is American failure — in the economy, in the war on terror, in the struggle in Iraq.

These truths put Kerry and the Democrats in an unbearably awkward position. Despite all the commentators’ advice about how they should conduct themselves between now and November, their destiny is principally in others’ hands. They know it. There’s almost nothing they can do about it.

In that regard, the 2004 election is like so many contests where a president is running for re-election, only worse because the nation is living in an especially dangerous time. Gov. Bill Clinton understood this dynamic implicitly in the comparatively placid days of 1992, though he had an assist from billionaire Ross Perot, who upended the customary calculus. Clinton knew that his first presidential campaign was essentially a prolonged job interview, but first he had to convince the hiring committee to fire the other guy, and then he had to convince the committee to hire him instead.

The hiring committee consists of more than 100 million Americans who, on Election Day, cast their vote and their verdict. Of all the advice Clinton has given Kerry, the senator’s aides say, the job-interview metaphor has been the most powerful.

For that reason, President Bush is the central figure of the election — and the economy, the war on terrorism and the disquiet in Iraq are the principal factors. But he sets the tone and timbre of the election.

Bush is a curious figure, both strong and vulnerable, both decisive and tentative. To the eye his rhetoric seems like steel, to the ear it sometimes seems like tin. He is reminiscent not so much of any American president as of Lytton Strachey’s description of Lord Melbourne, the prime minister in Queen Victoria’s time who, like Bush, had a tenuous hold on the legislative branch:

“He was an autumn rose. With all his gracious amenity, his humour, his happy-go-lucky ways, a deep disquietude possessed him. A sentimental cynic, a skeptical believer, he was restless and melancholy at heart. Above all, those sensitive petals shivered in every wind.”

That’s one of the reasons the Bush campaign seeks so aggressively to portray the president as an optimist. This month he’s been trumpeting the good news (288,000 pieces of good news) on job creation, saying in Prairie du Chien, Wisc.: “I can’t tell you how optimistic I am about the economy.” The title of Bush’s bus tour in the industrial Midwest: “Yes, America Can.”

The president is positive on the stump, negative on the tube. In televised ads, the Bush campaign has knocked Kerry … but has not knocked him out. At least yet. Samuel Johnson, talking (from experience) of his own trade as a writer, once said, “Abuse is often of service: There is nothing so dangerous to an author as silence; his name, like a shuttlecock, must be beat backward and forward, or it falls to the ground.”

Despite the anti-Kerry barrage, the pollster John Zogby thinks Bush will lose the election, mostly because only 44 percent feel that the country is headed in the right direction, and only 43 percent believe that the president deserves another term. His data show that 51 percent say it is time for someone new.

But it’s early. At this stage of the 1992 race, the president’s father was in first place, Clinton in third. Much can happen between now and November.

The peril for the president, of course, is that so much of what can happen can be bad — for the country and, as a result, for him. That makes the Democrats something like ghouls at the political picnic, a position that makes some of them feel uncomfortable.

“It’s a constant struggle,” Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania said in an interview. “You don’t want American boys to die. You don’t want to wish things continue to get screwed up in Iraq. You don’t want this prisoner scandal to widen. You feel this in your gut. We need (instead) to argue that we need a change in priorities.”

That’s where the Kerry campaign is this month. “This election will be impacted hugely by events out of anyone’s control, but mostly out of our control,” says David Wade, Kerry’s traveling press secretary.

Which isn’t to say that Kerry isn’t trying to persuade Americans to change their CEO and, while he’s at it, to convince them that, as Richard Nixon would have put it, he’s the one. But it’s a tough case to make. Americans have never repudiated a wartime president, which is the profile Bush is assuming. The two times the nation changed parties in wartime, during the Korean War (1952) and Vietnam (1968), came when the incumbent, in both cases a Democrat, decided not to seek another term.

For all the talk of Bush’s status as a war president, his destiny still may be controlled by the economy. Zogby believes the election is Kerry’s to lose, but his polls also show that the economy is still the most important issue. Right now there’s evidence for the optimism Bush is seeking to personify. The election for president in 2004 is mostly about the president, still.

– David Shribman is a columnist for Universal Press Syndicate.