One thing that didn’t get much attention last week — President Bush’s approval rating in the New York Times poll was 22 percent! He’s helped set the stage for a top-to-bottom repudiation of Republicans in the House, Senate, and presidential races a week from Tuesday. Perceptions of a Democratic mandate are sure to follow.

What’s striking about this is that so many people thought that President Bush would be a transformational president who would reshape American politics. Instead, he’s on the verge of becoming the Jimmy Carter to Obama’s Reagan. For instance, here’s what I wrote in early 2002 before it became clear that Bush would squander his political capital so profoundly:

Bush now has a realistic opportunity to become a president who defines the terms of American politics long after leaving office. In his book The Politics Presidents Make, the Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek argues that transformational presidents engage in “the politics of reconstruction,” in which they build a new political regime in opposition to the crumbling and de-legitimized order they have replaced. Examples include Franklin Delano Roosevelt after Herbert Hoover and Ronald Reagan after Jimmy Carter.

Seen in this light, the State of the Union address can be read as a conscious attempt to define an entirely new order. In it, Bush elaborated a vision of a moral America defending freedom with an extensive domestic anti-terror apparatus at home and an interventionist and open-ended war on terrorism and rogue states abroad. “[T]his will be a decisive decade in the history of liberty,” he said. “We’ve been called to a unique role in human events.”

In addition, Bush’s entire domestic agenda has now been re-conceptualized in terms of security, from “security in retirement” (pension reform, Social Security privatization) to “economic security” (education reform, energy production, free trade, tax cuts). Finally, Bush endorsed national service as a component of homeland defense and to promote an ethic of personal responsibility and civic virtue…

Bush has left the box of 1990s American politics altogether, defining a secure and moral future against an insecure and self-indulgent past. Skowronek says transformational presidents “retrieve from a far distant, even mythic, past fundamental values that they claimed have been lost.” Reagan, for example, described his “Revolution” as “a rediscovery of our values and our common sense.” Here’s Bush: “After America was attacked, it was as if our entire country looked into a mirror and saw our better selves.”

On its own, this may seem obvious — America was self-indulgent in the 1990s, we did fail to take the threats against us seriously, and the war on terrorism is incredibly important. But just as Reagan broke from and stigmatized old-style liberalism, Bush can now frame Democratic opposition as representative of a discredited, Clintonian past. Call it “changing the tone” squared. Concerns about missile defense, civil liberties or the wisdom of overthrowing rogue regimes like Iraq can be portrayed as dangerous and self-indulgent, the echoes of a dying era.

This framing is especially hard for Democrats to counter because most will not stand in stark opposition to the Clinton legacy as Bush is. And as it becomes common wisdom, fair or not, that Clinton failed to do all he could to prevent 9/11, Bush’s politics will increasingly come to seem a much-needed corrective. Like Al Gore, Democrats may find themselves unable to offer a compelling vision that breaks as clearly from the past.

You can almost do a find and replace on this passage to bring it up to date. Bush is now serving the role that Clinton did after 9/11 (the representative of the repudiated past), while Obama is the one claiming that a previous ideology has been discredited and promising a new beginning.