ONE OF THE ANOMALIES I have mentioned several times is the gap between the American economy’s performance, and the public’s perception of the quality of President Bush’s economic management. The first thing to keep in mind is that the U..S economy is a huge, sprawling, diversified beast, driven in the long run by the entrepreneurial energy and the hard work of individuals. There is no room in the White House that contains a series of dials and buttons that the president can use to control the economy’s performance.

That said, economic policy decisions taken by the president can affect the rate of economic growth, the inflation rate, and other variables, within limits. Lyndon Johnson set the stage for an inflationary spurt by trying to wring both guns and butter from the economy, without raising taxes to pay for the war in Vietnam. Jimmy Carter came close to wrecking the economy with a set of programs that created that least desirable of conditions, stagflation: high inflation and negative growth. In the long-run, such policies prove self-correcting, as voters turn out the rascals who, left in office, would have brought the nation to ruin, and install proponents of corrective policies, as they did when they chose Ronald Reagan, who unleashed Paul Volcker and the Federal Reserve Board to wring inflation out of the system while Reagan took the flack for the recession that was needed to cool the economy.