If anyone dares to suggest that the entrepreneurial spirit is dead in President Bush’s America, let him come to Austin, Texas. Let him talk to Jeff Lewis and Bill Callen. Not too many months after Mr. Bush moved into the White House, Mr. Callen was watching the president on television. And into his head popped the phrase: “Like Father, Like Son: One Term Only.”

Mr. Callen mentioned the phrase to his friend Jeff Lewis. At the time, both were unemployed bartenders, but Mr. Lewis had worked in e-commerce, and they decided to plaster Mr. Callen’s new slogan on shirts and coffee mugs and market them over the Internet.

The rest is history – at least to anyone familiar with the brief, strange story of Bush-hating in America.

“Two Unemployed Democrats Company” is now one of the nation’s largest merchandisers of anti-Bush paraphernalia, with 22 employees helping to move an expected $1 million in sales by election day. This summer Messrs. Callen and Lewis even opened an outlet store in Austin.

“I don’t like that word ‘hater,’ “Mr. Lewis told me. “I don’t think hate belongs anywhere. It’s just that I really don’t like having this” – he paused, searching for the right word – “this very common man in the Oval Office.”

Few of Mr. Lewis’s customers, I suspect, would agree to being called “haters,” suggesting as it does a feeling that’s irrational and uncontrolled. But surely we can all agree that people who pay $9.95 for a CD of “I Hate Republicans” or $14.95 for a “Presidential Piata” – “A great way to rid yourself of that ‘frustration’ when you see him on TV!” – have passed from “distaste” into “outright contempt.”

Animosity for Mr. Bush, as both a man and a president, is one of the animating forces of the election. A Harris poll last week showed that among Kerry voters, 40% say they’re voting “against Bush” rather than “for Kerry.” Among Bush voters, by contrast, 17% say their vote is “against Kerry” rather than “for Bush.”

The shelves at Barnes & Noble and Borders groan under the weight of Bush-hating books, from “The Lies of George W. Bush” to “The I Hate George W. Bush Reader: Why Dubya is Wrong About Absolutely Everything.”

Their thesis was pithily, if extremely, summed up by the novelist Dan Chaon in a recent article in the online magazine Slate. Mr. Bush, Mr. Chaon said, “is probably not the anti-Christ” – what a relief – “but he comes as close as anyone in my lifetime.”

So extraordinary is the contempt for Mr. Bush that informed observers agree they haven’t seen anything like it since – well, since four years ago and the presidency of Bill Clinton.

Glancing through the racks at Two Unemployed Democrats, I was reminded of nothing so much as the classified ads in the Clinton-hating American Spectator magazine, circa 1997, when a few dollars could buy you a Bill and Hillary Dartboard or an anatomically correct doll of the putatively priapic president.

Intense as it was, the right-wing hatred of Mr. Clinton was ideologically inexplicable. Mr. Clinton – father of welfare reform and balanced budgets – was easily the most conservative Democratic president since Grover Cleveland.

So it is with Mr. Bush, who has expanded the role of government in education and health care far beyond the dreams of Clinton, while advancing a foreign policy crusade to spread democracy that would have delighted the Democratic idol John F. Kennedy.

“This kind of hatred isn’t fueled by the ideology of the president in office,” says Gary Alan Fine, a professor of sociology at Northwestern, who studies presidential reputations. Its origins, Mr. Fine says, are instead found in each president’s earlier years, which in retrospect elevate the man to the status of cultural symbol.

Fine points to Richard Nixon, despised by his political opponents out of all proportion to the relatively liberal, pro- welfare-state policies he advanced.

To Nixon-haters, however, their man could never shake his associations with the McCarthyite red baiting of his earlier career. With Mr. Clinton, also: His youth as an anti-war activist pegged him, for Clinton-haters, as an anti-establishment symbol that no amount of conservative governance could overcome.

And President Bush? “Bush embodies that sense of class privilege, of a feckless frat boy getting something that he didn’t earn,” Mr. Fine says. In his young manhood, Mr. Bush left behind him a string of failed enterprises and still ended up on top, thanks to the help of wealthy friends – an impression only reinforced by the 2000 election, when he lost the popular vote but won the White House, thanks to the Electoral College and the Supreme Court.

I’m not sure I buy Mr. Fine’s theory, but he deserves credit for acknowledging the strangeness of the Bush-hating fever. What’s undeniable is that, like the Clinton-hating pathology, it entangles cultural forces that transcend politics.

Back in Austin, Mr. Lewis eagerly handed me stacks of mail from grateful customers. The tone varied from poignant to scatological, but running through it all was a sense of offended superiority, perhaps the chief mark of the Bush hater.

“I always prided myself on being more classy than Bush and all his Republicans buddies,” wrote one correspondent, signing herself “Julie.” “But now I’ve realized that we’ll just have to be as crass and base as they are.”

It is a sacrifice that Bush haters seem more than willing to make.

Mr. Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg News.