With so much going wrong lately for President Bush and public opinion polls showing his job approval rating sagging below 40%, people are wondering what has happened to the president who just more than a year ago won more votes than anyone in the history of American presidential elections. It wasn’t that long ago that Mr. Bush was basking in the glory of the purple fingerprints of Iraqi elections, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon. He was setting out to overhaul Social Security and fundamentally reform the tax code.

Now, a series of setbacks – the successful Democratic effort to blame the president for Hurricane Katrina, the fumble that was the Harriet Miers nomination, the effort by Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald to prevent Mr. Bush’s aides from talking to reporters, and defeats in votes in the House on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and in the Senate on an amendment interpreted as a criticism of the war in Iraq – have the president playing defense.

This president governs from principle rather than poll numbers, and he has battled back from behind before. So we’d caution against misunderestimating him prematurely as a lame duck. Every one of our greatest presidents – Washington, Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Kennedy, Reagan – has suffered from domestic criticism in the midst of the great wars for freedom. Congress spent much of the American Revolution second-guessing Washington for his delays in confronting the British forces. Lincoln faced draft riots in New York in 1863 after allowing Lee to escape, as Joshua Wolf Shenk recounts in his fine new book ‘Lincoln’s Melancholy.’ Roosevelt was attacked for his domestic policies and his delay in invading Europe. In the Cold War, Kennedy was embarrassed by the defeat at the Bay of Pigs, and Reagan by Iran-Contra.

Some of our friends on the right think Mr. Bush needs a better communications operation. We’re in the camp that believes the American people are wise enough not to be spun. If the substance is there, the public relations takes care of itself. For all the Republican handwringing and the Democratic criticism, Mr. Bush is doing okay in relative terms. As realclearpolitics.com, a source we turn to for aggregating poll data, points out, Mr. Bush’s approval ratings are nine points better than those of congressional Democrats. For good reason. The president has had successes in the nomination of Chief Justice Roberts and, it looks so far, in the nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. The economy is resilient and strong, and the deficit is shrinking.

The hard left already disapproved of Mr. Bush, so it’s reasonable to believe that some of the president’s recent fall-off in the polls is the result of conservatives and centrists disappointed by Mr. Bush’s failure so far to deliver on some of his campaign promises. He promised fundamental tax reform and private accounts for Social Security and has so far delivered neither. He promised a more aggressive leadership of the war on terrorism than Senator Kerry, yet he’s been delegating Iran policy to the “EU-3” of Britain, France, and Germany; he held hands with the king of Saudi Arabia on a walk through the flowers, and his public pressure on Syria has yet to pay off in regime change in Damascus. He promised immigration reform that would end the mismatch between our labor market and our immigration laws, and he hasn’t delivered on that, either. We’d predict that the president’s popularity will start to soar again when he starts delivering on some of the promises that won him that historic and well-deserved victory a year ago, in November 2004.