By Jeff Zeleny

Chicago Tribune

KENNEBUNKPORT, Maine – A little more than a mile away from the Bush family estate here on Walker’s Point, a dozen or so brazen Democrats have opened a storefront designed to send a message that they hope President Bush suffers the same re-election fate as his father.

On the first floor of a yellow clapboard house, beneath a blue “Kennebunkport for Kerry and Edwards” banner, volunteers worked Sunday to restock the shelves from a bustling weekend along the Ocean Drive shopping district. The stacks of campaign literature for Democratic candidates John Kerry and John Edwards were running low, and the T-shirts had nearly sold out.

“I don’t think of this as Bush country,” explained Jackie McKim, a 67-year-old retired teacher who helped set up the new Democratic headquarters last month in a town where they are outnumbered 2-to-1 by Republicans. “I think of it as Kerrybunkport.”

It may be tempting for some Democrats to draw comparisons between the two Bush re-election drives, especially after the current and former president spent a rare weekend fishing together off the Maine coast. But three months before Election Day, the condition of the father and the son’s political campaigns are strikingly different.

Twelve years ago, President George H.W. Bush endured a painful August, with more than three-quarters of the electorate disapproving of how he was handling the economy. Heading into the Republican convention, polls showed him with a 20-point deficit to Bill Clinton, an approval rating of 30 percent and four out of five Americans believing the nation was headed in the wrong direction.

While George W. Bush’s once-soaring popularity has gradually fallen amid doubts over the war in Iraq and an unconvincing economic recovery, Republicans and Democrats agree his political health is far better than his father’s at the same point of his presidency. Not only did the younger Bush start aggressively planning for a second term nearly a year sooner, he has attempted to address the economic dilemma head-on even as he campaigns as a wartime president.

The elder Bush’s punishing defeat, according to Republicans close to the Bush family, serves as a driving force of this campaign.

“It’s stands a constant lesson and a model of what not to do. They have been talking and thinking about that since the day the father lost,” said Bruce Buchanan, a University of Texas political scientist who carefully follows the Bush political legend. “It’s been a huge issue and a preoccupation of theirs. It has created an intense motivation to avoid mistakes and be aggressive.”

The tight race with Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts worries many of the president’s admirers. In conversations with more than a dozen supporters at campaign stops last week, half of those interviewed expressed at least some concern about a race that seems to be unusually influenced by factors beyond either candidate’s control.

“I think it’s a tough race for him,” said Avery Weaver, a Republican county commissioner from Corunna, Mich. “He’s more committed and he’s more focused than his dad was, but this is a different time. On the world issues and the security, it’s a different situation today than it was when his father was in office.”

But after listening to Bush address a rally one evening late last week in Saginaw, Mich., Weaver said he felt more passionate about the president’s re-election than he had all year. The lingering threat of terrorism is reason enough to give Bush a second term, he said, a rationale that echoes one of the campaign’s top arguments.

The president has undertaken an aggressive August travel schedule, deciding against taking a traditional summer break in favor of spending the majority of the month campaigning in battleground states. As he addressed audiences last week in Iowa, Ohio and Michigan, the war on terrorism and the duty to safeguard America emerged as a dominant theme.

“A very important lesson of September the 11th, one this nation must never forget, is that when we see threats, we must deal with them before they fully materialize,” Bush told an applauding crowd in Columbus. “That’s one of the vital lessons of that fateful day.”

For more than a year, the president has pursued his re-election effort through the lens of a wartime leader. At most every campaign rally hangs a banner, with blurred shades of red, white and blue, declaring: “America. Stronger, safer, better.”

“I wish I wasn’t the war president,” Bush told an audience Friday in Washington. “Who in the heck wants to be the war president? I don’t. But this is our duty.”

Indeed, by the 1992 election, the Gulf War had long faded from the forefront of voters’ minds and the elder Bush’s popularity earned in that conflict seemed to barely matter. But his son’s re-election bid is unfolding alongside an active military campaign, which allows him to present himself as the commander-in-chief.

“It creates a pull on the electorate that his father could not match,” said Buchanan. “It may turn into a disadvantage, but it’s potentially an advantage depending on how the events unfold.”

As Bush embarks on a seven-state campaign swing from Florida to Oregon this week, GOP candidates for state and federal office will surround him. During the final months of his father’s re-election campaign, however, Republicans started keeping their distance, afraid that his unpopularity would affect their races.

“He has a very strong group of supporters that will lay down in front of a stampede for him,” said Charlie Brooke, the Republican mayor of Davenport, Iowa, who saw Bush last week but remains undecided in the presidential race. “On the other hand, I think he’s been more divisive for the country because when he stands on his principles, there are a lot of people that have different principles and they get angry and contrary.”

But to Geraldine Lyszczyk, a 71-year-old admirer from Bay City, Mich., the president’s campaign style is what distinguishes him from his father. “He’s livelier and more exuberant,” she declared, moments after coming within a few feet of him at a rally last week.

“He is not his father’s president, he is his father’s son. He’s very much his own man,” said Dana Smith, a retired Air Force mechanic from Lancaster, Ohio. “I’m not a hard-core, book-banging Republican, but this election is the most important election. It’s not between Democrats and Republicans, it’s between right and wrong.”

Here in Kennebunkport, as the president’s motorcade left town Sunday, the foot traffic around the Democratic offices picked up. A woman who identified herself as a strong supporter of Bush chided the Democratic volunteers.

“A couple Republicans have come in and been very nasty,” McKim said. “But we’re trying to run a positive headquarters. We all still have to live around here.”