Sununu Goes, Bad Economy Stays : Would Camp David economic conference help?

Tuesday the President did something smart. He accepted the resignation of White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu and thus removed from his shoulders the burden of carrying a major personality problem forward into next year’s presidential election. But even if Sununu’s departure eases some of the President’s frictions with Congress and others, it doesn’t directly address the one problem that more than anything else could make Bush a one-term President: the stumbling economy. So there’s something else a presumably smart President must now do.

NO CONFIDENCE: Many indicators suggest a weak recovery, at best, from recession. And one indicator that has been increasingly bleak is consumer confidence. Shrinking confidence is a powerful engine driving the economy downward. No doubt the consumer flu that is keeping the buyer at home--or bringing home nothing more consequential than a few pairs of socks--is based on conditions of rising unemployment, a shaken banking system, corporate bottom-line struggles and various other economic ailments. But it also is no help that the general perception is that the President and his advisers, for all their diplomatic skills abroad, are ill-equipped and almost at sea on economic issues.

Worse yet, now that almost everyone is urging the President to “do something” about the economy, the fear is that whatever the Administration might do will make the problem worse. The Economist writes this week that “the last thing the President must do is to treat the recession as a crisis, or the economy will follow his lead.”

But there’s a flaw in that logic. The American people expect the President to be attentive to the economy; so the fear is not that the Administration will overreact but that its endemic preoccupation with foreign-policy problems has inhibited economic understanding and has diverted attention from considering policy approaches to ameliorate the downturn and its pain. How can consumer confidence be assuaged by the specter of a President who feels the best thing he can do about serious recession is to act as if it’s not really serious?

NO IDEAS: Far better, it seems to us, would be the President’s active engagement in economic issues. This is an intelligent, well-educated President, and what he should do is invite the best economic minds of America--the Nobel laureates in economics, the prominent professors, the most respected experts, the thoughtful captains of industry--to discuss the economy, define the problem and consider various responses. Such economic brainstorming sessions could be held at Camp David, away from the madness of Washington, perhaps on successive weekends, perhaps devoting one weekend to defining the economic problem and the subsequent one to sketching out various solutions. The President must go beyond his Sununu-less current staff--and beyond his current Council of Economic Advisers--to expose himself to the best ideas from the best economic minds in America.

What’s more important right now?