Missteps on Economy Worry Bush Supporters

But those ideas often clashed, and the officials proved too outspoken. So Bush swung the team in the opposite direction, filling it with replacements who would stick to the White House message and keep out of the news. But those officials have not generated fresh policies.

"They've populated the place with an absence of ideas guys, which is fine if you think you can put it on autopilot and win," he said. "But it doesn't look like it's working."

Others say the economic team was kept straight in the first two years by Joshua B. Bolten, the deputy chief of staff for policy. When Bolten left last year to head the White House budget office, the wheels started coming off the operation, one Senate Republican aide said.

Administration officials contend that as the economic recovery takes hold and jobs begin proliferating, GOP concerns will disappear. Treasury spokesman Rob Nichols said that, already, the unemployment rate has fallen, disposable income has risen, single-family home ownership is at record levels and worker productivity is high.

But outside the White House, allies are worried. The recent losing streak has the administration "on its heels," said Daniel J. Mitchell, an economist at the Heritage Foundation.

This week, Reps. Robert W. Ney (R-Ohio) and Donald Manzullo (R-Ill.), who represent hard-hit manufacturing districts, requested a meeting with Bush to get him to refocus his economic message. "Let me try to be diplomatic about this," Manzullo said. "The president needs to bring together in a single, simple focus the things he really believes in. He's got the right stuff. He just needs to sharpen the focus."

The flap over Raimondo may be the most glaring breakdown, critics say. He is a well-respected chairman and chief executive of a prefabricated-building manufacturer. But his company -- Behlen Manufacturing Co. of Columbus, Neb. -- laid off 1,180 workers from its five U.S. plants in the past three years while opening a plant in Beijing.

That was only the most recent problem. The release last month of the Economic Report of the President by the White House Council of Economic Advisers has proven to be rich fodder for Democrats, who promise it will appear in ads. First came the flap over a passage that appeared to praise the recent movement of U.S. service jobs to such low-wage countries as India: "When a good or service is produced more cheaply abroad, it makes more sense to import it than make or provide it domestically."

Then, critics turned their attention to the report's anticipation that 2004 employment would on average be 2.6 million jobs higher than last year. The secretaries of commerce and the Treasury, and then the president, quickly backed off that projection.

Finally, Democrats latched on to an obtuse question in the report, "When a fast-food restaurant sells a hamburger . . . is it providing a 'service' or is it combining inputs to 'manufacture' a product?" The point, administration economists said, was to question the practicality of congressional proposals to offer tax breaks to manufacturers. But Democrats accused the White House of wanting to reclassify burger flippers as Joe Lunchpails.

The reactions were unfair, said two former White House officials, but in an election year, they should have been anticipated. They said the extensive vetting process that governed previous report releases must have broken down. "Clearly, people didn't read it," one of the former officials said. "This stuff was not hard to find."

As the White House was putting out those brush fires, officials had to deal with the comments of N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. Mankiw managed to anger manufacturers, software writers and even radiologists in his extended take on the "outsourcing" of jobs overseas.

"Outsourcing is just a new way of doing international trade," he told reporters. "More things are tradable than were tradable in the past, and that's a good thing."

But administration officials concede that, so far, it has been a good thing mainly for Democrats.