"The night is passing and we are waiting for the day to come," Governor George W Bush told delegates to the August 2000 Republican Convention in Philadelphia. With such hyperbole presidential candidates conjure up for voters the sense of the edge of a new era, and that, uniquely, they are on the side of history, they alone can be trusted to steer the ship of state in these new times.
But the night had not passed. America's darkest hour, 9/11, would fall on his watch, following an election in which the issues were largely economic and Clinton's character. In that same speech in which he eloquently pledged "to use these good times for great goals", Mr Bush touched only briefly on the security of the US.
Today, an eon away from 2000, President Bush brings his party's convention and its 5,000 delegates to New York, again formally to ratify his candidacy, in truth to manufacture the surge in the poll ratings such stage-managed conventions bring.
Gone will be the phoney optimism, the ridiculing and demonising of the outgoing presidency, and the candidate's branding as an innocent outsider. In their place will be carefully weaved an image of a brave and decisive commander in chief, abandoned by - not abandoning - his timorous foreign allies. A man to be judged for his character, not his brains, for his broad-brush instinct, not for his "nuanced" intellectualising.
For such an image make-over party managers need the backdrop of battered New York, whether its citizens like it or not. And they don't. A New York Times/CBS poll on Friday found that 52 per cent of New Yorkers would have preferred the Republicans to have chosen another city and 53 per cent are very or somewhat worried that a terrorist attack will happen this week. Sixty five per cent are against US involvement in Iraq - many took to the streets to make the point.
But of course New Yorkers don't matter - theirs is not one of the 20 battleground states (in 13 of which Kerry is narrowly ahead) where the election will be decided. What matters for the Republicans is to recapture the spirit of post-9/11 marching-together-under-one-banner - that period between Mr Bush's dramatic post-election poll decline and the gradual realisation by the American public - over 50 per cent now for the first time - that they were sold a pup on Iraq.
Republican party managers have been working hard to ensure the radical right-wing delegates sing off the same hymn sheet as a President desperate to appeal to the elusive middle ground of voters. So the draft programme, approved last week, heaps praise on Mr Bush's record on terrorism, the partial privatisation of state pensions, and tax cuts.
But reality has a way of intruding, and the manufactured feelgood will have a hard time dispelling the harsher truths of life in Bush's America. On Friday the US Census Bureau reported that the national poverty rate rose 12.5 per cent in 2003 while middle incomes stagnated at levels $1,600 lower in real terms than 1999. This week may give Mr Bush the edge but the race is far from won.