Accidents of history may finally turn on Bush.

As the presidential debate season heats up, and Democrats hone in on the, best case to oust President Bush, there's no shortage of promising fodder--from the sluggish economy to the mess in Iraq. But there's one clinching argument that no Democrat has yet made, but which captures all this and more:

George Bush is just plain bad luck!

Look at how things have changed since this guy got into office.

Before George W. Bush terrorists didn't launch massive scary assaults on the U.S. homeland--now we've had Sept. 11, and who knows what else lies in store?

Before George W. Bush the stock market was around 11,000--now it's barely 9,000.

Before George W. Bush we had the longest economic expansion in our history. Now we've lost more than 2 million jobs, the worst employment reversal since Herbert Hoover.

Before George W. Bush we were looking at surpluses as far as the eye could see. Now we've got record budget deficits, and Bush has plans to double the national debt.

Add it up--terrorism, war, job loss, debt--and there's only one fair conclusion: This guy is bad luck!

We shouldn't pooh-pooh the power of luck as a political argument. People may be wary of a leader who claims he has God on his side, but they do want a leader who seems to have "the gods" on his side.

Indeed, the way man lives at luck's mercy has captured the literary and philosophical imagination from the dawn of time. The Greeks worshipped the goddess Fortuna. Machiavelli, in "The Prince," written in 1513, assigned half of what happens in this world to the mysterious power of Fortuna, with her force tamed only in part by prudent action and planning.

Then there's the matter of how we all got here. "You find yourself in this world only through an infinity of accidents," wrote Blaise Pascal, the 17th century French mathematician and philosopher. "Your birth is due to a marriage, or rather a series of marriages of those who have gone before you. But those marriages were often the result of a chance meeting, or words uttered at random, of a hundred unforeseen and unintended occurrences."

The question of whether and how society should respond to luck's influence has been a bedrock dividing line both in the moral outlooks of individuals and in rival political philosophies.

Conservatives, worried that an honest admission of luck's role would sanction economy-killing egalitarianism, have always ended up downplaying or ignoring luck. Liberals have typically been unwilling to craft efforts to ease the burden of bad luck in ways that preserve the best of capitalist innovation and the virtues of individual responsibility.

Respect for luck could well make voters want to bet on something new in 2004. After all, up until he became president, he (and we) had reason to think Bush was pretty lucky. Which makes it a good bet that Bush's bad luck as president is some kind of cosmic payback for insufficient gratitude and humility. As Ann Richards used to quip, "George Bush was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple."

"Why should all of us have to suffer for one man's bad luck?" Democratic candidates should cry. It's a mantra that can be delivered half in jest, as a laugh line on the stump. But people will also hear the half that's arguably serious, and they'll think about it.

Sticking with an unlucky president is not something a country does lightly.

Matthew Miller is co-host of the KCRW-FM program "Left, Right & Center" and author of the book, "The 2 Percent Solution: Fixing America's Problems in Ways Liberals and Conservatives Can Love."