Does another Bush not get it? Sure, the son has got to focus on a war to preserve the nation's security, as his father did. But like Dad, he misjudges the nation's economy at his peril. Bush has shown a willingness to inject politics into some economic decisions. He imposed tariffs on foreign steel and signed a subsidy-laden agricultural bill, tinkering with markets in order to placate crucial constituencies. But faced with corporate scandals and a market meltdown, our first M.B.A. President hadn't found an easy remedy. He could draw from his own business defeats some empathy for the everyday victims of the current market malaise. But one day he is ducking questions, insisting all that matters is the economy's reviving fundamentals. The next he is doing what an adviser calls "his Charles Schwab imitation"—discussing price-earnings ratios and suggesting that bonds might be a good buy. Even his speech to Wall Street on corporate misconduct, which was promoted as proof that he shared investor outrage, was unconvincing to some. "You can tell when he really cares about something, when he's into it," says an adviser to the President's father. "And he didn't look into it."

That may be because Bush doesn't believe the market's gyrations have much to do with the basic vitality of the economy. For plenty of Americans, especially the 60% who own stocks, they're one and the same. But Bush's view is "more old-fashioned," as an adviser puts it. To him, corporations and businessmen who produce things are the backbone of the economy, while the markets and investors are a vaguely sinister sideshow. Bush's first reaction to revelations of corporate misconduct was to assume the best. Yes, corporate America tripped up here and there, but the subsequent hysteria was stirred up by the overheated media. He didn't want to overreact lest he hamstring honest executives. "He didn't want to do something that would hurt the real economy just to fix a perception problem," says a senior adviser.

Bush came to his benevolent view of corporate America by way of Midland, Texas, where the young Harvard Business School graduate landed in 1975 hoping to strike it rich in the oil business. There, Bush recalls, businesses were filled with "good men" who would strike a deal on a handshake or the strength of a family name. When the oil boom went bust, as it did for Bush in the mid-1980s, small-business men didn't cash out their stock options and run; they took pay cuts and tried to help their employees. To Bush, Enron and WorldCom were aberrations, the fault of a few bad actors in an otherwise sound system. "We were, like, What in the world?" says Commerce Secretary Donald Evans of his conversations with Bush. "We were just kind of bewildered. It is unbelievable to us."