President Bush has spent much of the month battling – battling to win Americans’ approval for the war in Iraq, battling to improve his poll numbers, battling to shape his place in history. These are very different battles.

Public support for the war is eroding, and it is sobering to consider that in none of the small-war scenarios Americans have fought since the last big war (World War II) has a war actually gained popularity with time. The reason, eerily enough, has been the same in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq: Presidents have tried, but failed, to make the difficult argument that American national security is truly at stake in a war in which American national interests did not seem at play.

Mr. Bush himself put it succinctly in his radio address on March 11: “Amid the daily news of car bombs and kidnappings and brutal killings, I can understand why many of our fellow citizens are now wondering if the entire mission is worth it.”

Presidential job approval is not immutable, but only two presidents before Bush have been able to fight back after their public-approval ratings dipped below the 40 percent mark. Both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton did so. But they accomplished that task in their first terms, when public sentiments were not as solidly formed as they are for President Bush in his second term – and neither was presiding over a long and increasingly unpopular war.

History hard to predict

History is a different matter, and we have seen how resistant it is to prediction; none of those people who were mild about Harry in the Truman years nor enraged about Lyndon Johnson in the youth rebellion days of the Vietnam era would have imagined that the nation would later embrace these presidents for their bluntness and their far-sightedness. Mr. Bush is wasting his time and ours if he tries to outsmart history (harder than outsmarting the financial markets), and if he forgets the first law of history: It’s written by people who aren’t even born yet.

Even so, the president is in a pickle, he knows it (and can do something about it), his supporters know it (and are struggling to do something about it), and the Democrats know it (and are apparently powerless to do anything about it). The latter fact is an advantage Mr. Bush has that Presidents Reagan and Clinton, who had smart, skilled, disciplined, motivated and nimble oppositions, did not possess.

Everywhere the Democrats are being quoted as saying they feel – in their hearts, in their heads, in their bones – that 2006 is a lot like 1994, the year Newt Gingrich and his Republican rebels ended four decades of Democratic rule in the House. But the 1994 Republicans were united by a coherent set of ideas on domestic policy and were not riven by foreign-policy questions. Neither can be said about the 2006 Democrats, who are as confounded by Iraq as some of the Republicans outside the White House.

Preoccupied with polls

President Bush’s ratings are a preoccupation within the White House, as they were in the Clinton years, even when, like today, the president cannot run for re-election. “When Dick first heard my approval rating was 38 percent,” Mr. Bush said, in a reference to Vice President Cheney, at Washington’s Gridiron dinner this month, “he said, ‘What’s your secret?'” Funny line, but the president’s line of thinking is not funny, nor is his predicament, which raises ancient questions about governance:

Should the leader of a popularly elected government follow popular opinion? How does a leader distinguish between the times when he should listen to the public and the times when he should lead the public? And there is one question that has faded from relevance in the low-approval-ratings second Bush term: Is political capital worth husbanding or spending, and when is the appropriate time for either?

These questions bedevil all politicians and are especially troubling today in the White House, where they are not theoretical but real. They especially trouble Republicans, who believe they have become the natural party of governance but are having a heck of a time governing.

“The war’s gotten very unpopular,” says former House majority leader Richard K. Armey of Texas. “(The president) had this Dubai thing, the triumph of demagoguery over common sense. The poll numbers aren’t all that good. He’s had a lot of negatives but hasn’t had much success with his initiatives. He’s just bogged down.”

Little reason for optimism

Bogged down – and bummed out. The president is an optimist, but there’s little to be optimistic about. And that sense of torpor has infected the political establishment, including the candidates for president on both sides. All about is a sense of malaise much like the one that surrounded the nation in the Carter years.

The president is trying to rally the nation and to rally his supporters. The Democrats are trying to do the same thing. But the tragedy of the situation is that both sides seem caught in drearily familiar, even stale, roles. One has little to say but stay the course. The other has little to offer but to say that the emperor has no clothes. The result is a dispiriting politics – and a war that continues to rage on without consensus either here or in Iraq.

Opportunity knocks

The point here is that, politically speaking, this is a great opportunity for both sides, if only they will take it. The president has to sharpen his rationale for the war, convince the public that it is a worthwhile enterprise or bring the whole episode to an end. Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, pretty much agree on that (but on that alone).

The Democrats have to sharpen their rationale for opposing the president (thinking he isn’t too bright is not good enough) and figure out what they stand for (being against what the president supports isn’t good enough). They have to do these things for their own good. But, more important, they have to do them for our good.