Waco, Tex. ? Message from McLennan County to George W. Bush: Yes, it’s still the economy that matters, but this isn’t your father’s recession.

Nearly 10 years after Bill Clinton invited experts to Arkansas to diagnose the wobbly economy he inherited from the first President Bush, his successor is summoning smart people to Texas this week to assess the economic conundrum he now faces.

Workers make final adjustments to the curtain around the briefing podium set up at Baylor University in Waco, Tex., the site for today's presidential economic forum.

Here in Bush’s back yard, many people say there’s no comparison between the latest downturn and the one that might have cost the elder Bush his job: This one seems a whole lot worse.

“The last time the bottom kind of dropped, we hardly even noticed it, because we didn’t have all those CEOs ripping us off,” said 72-year-old Betty Ritthaler of Hewitt, a Waco suburb. “This time it’s just obvious, in your face.”

Today’s White House economic forum couldn’t take place on friendlier territory. The 250 participants will gather on the campus of Baylor University in Waco, about 20 miles from the 1,600-acre ranch Bush calls home. The carefully screened roster of Cabinet secretaries, business leaders, economists, academics and other big thinkers will split into eight groups to discuss issues from corporate accountability to health-care security.

Many citizens of McLennan County speak fondly of Bush as a favorite son, and they give him generally high marks for the job he is doing as president. But even if they don’t hold him personally accountable for corporate America’s financial scandals, their outrage over executive misconduct underscores the peril facing politicians of both parties as they try to respond to a different kind of economic cycle. It will take more than recycled proposals, boilerplate rhetoric and a presidential forum to assuage their anger. They want their money back.

“Across the board, almost everyone has lost at least a third of what they had, and some a lot more,” said Diane Jamison, a Waco investment adviser. “You’ve got a lot of angry people out here.”

Many of them are older, more affluent Americans who are more likely to vote Republican, rather than blue-collar workers who traditionally lose their jobs in recessions. That makes the current downturn particularly treacherous for Bush, whose credentials as a business executive have suddenly become more of a liability than an asset.

“The people it really affects are retirees and near-retirees,” said David Wyss, chief economist for Standard & Poor’s, a financial analysis and information service. “You’re looking at rich old people. That’s pretty much the definition of the core Republican.”

Using the conventional yardsticks of job loss and contraction of the gross domestic product, Wyss noted, the recession of 2001 was (assuming it doesn’t stage a double-dip encore this year) the second mildest in postwar history. But in terms of value lost in the nation’s financial markets, it was the second worst.

Roughly $7.4 trillion in stock-market wealth has evaporated since the bubble was pricked in early 2000. Of that, $4.4 trillion has disappeared since Bush took the oath of office in January 2001. Not since Herbert Hoover and the crash of 1929 has the market fallen so far during the first 18 months of a president’s term.

The damage is not only deep, it is broad. About 50 percent of American households now own stock, up from 37 percent in 1992 and 19 percent in 1962. For the millions of Americans who have 401(k) and other defined-contribution retirement plans, falling stock prices show up immediately as shrunken nest eggs.

“We’re a nation of stockholders now, and it’s hard to find a person who’s not affected,” said Baylor finance Professor John Martin, a specialist in corporate governance.

The casualty list includes many of Bush’s 215,104 McLennan County neighbors.

Jerry Scott, 66, and his wife, Bunny, 65, depend on stock investments for about a quarter of their retirement income, and the market slide has cost them about $40,000. Scott, who spent 20 years in the Air Force and 19 at McDonnell Douglas Corp., blames crooked CEOs for most of the carnage.

“9-11 was nothing compared to what we’re going through now,” Scott said. “Enron, WorldCom, all these other companies stealing the money, carting it off. The conniving and the cheating have really destroyed confidence, not only in the companies but in the federal government, which we thought was overseeing all of that.”

Scott said he voted for Bush in 2000, and will probably do so again in 2004. But he thinks both the White House and Congress need to do more to restore integrity to the executive suite. “I think both parties are equally responsible,” he said. “If the Democrats try to pin all of this on Bush, that’s not good. They need to be looking at how to solve these problems rather than create more.”

Because stock ownership is more concentrated at the upper end of the income spectrum and Republicans are perceived as having closer ties to big business than Democrats, some observers believe GOP candidates are more vulnerable to voter retribution in this year’s midterm elections.

“If the stock market continues to nose-dive between now and November, I think you could see some shifting politically,” said Waco insurance agent Ron Keener, who has been busy selling low-risk annuities to people who have soured on stock investments.

Bush appears to be on safer ground, at least here in McLennan County.

“This has been going on for more than just the last year or two,” said Mike Hataway, who manages a Waco eatery called Buzzard Billy’s. “Most people realize he’s not the one who’s been cooking those books.”