Good article from the Guardian

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Jonathan Freedland: How Bush could lose It's not that voters think the current economic mess is literally the fault of Bush or the Republicans (though incumbents always get punished for a slump). It's that Americans don't have any confidence in them to do anything about it. Too many believe Bush and his administration are part of the problem, rather than the solution. As the New York Times puts it: "Bush himself is a product of the cowboy end of the Sunbelt economy," while most of his team look like 19th-hole buddies of the WorldCom crowd. His army secretary is a former Enron executive, while the SEC - the body probing Cheney - is led by the one-time lawyer of the accountancy industry.

Bush has only confirmed that impression when he's tried to dispel it. When he addressed Wall Street executives this month, he showed none of the outrage millions of Americans feel. He condemned corporate "fudging of the numbers" - far too mild a phrase for what most believe is grand larceny on an unprecedented scale. Not that anyone knows what he should say: all the old Republican remedies, especially any move towards deregulation, is only likely to make matters worse. The result is that the markets are not reassured by the president's repeated interventions.