How bad are things for Wall Street? Mark Twain once said that America had no native criminal class except for Congress. But a poll out this summer shows that 42 percent of Americans trust Congress more than Wall Street about three times as many who trust Wall Street more than Congress.

Usually business scandals play only small roles in American political contests, but this highly unusual political year framed by terrorism, a weak economy, and an inability of the party out of power to focus its energies and its entreaties could be an exception. Already there are small signs that politicians, who after all are Geiger counters of popular sentiment, believe that they can harness the public outrage over the Enron collapse and the WorldCom debacle.

In Arkansas, Atty. Gen. Mark Pryor, a Democrat trying to unseat GOP Sen. Tim Hutchinson, is questioning whether his opponent’s policies could erode retirement benefits of corporate employees. In Texas, Atty. Gen. John Cornyn, who is trying to retain the Republican Senate seat being relinquished by Sen. Phil Gramm, is facing demands that he recuse himself from an investigation of WorldCom accounting practices because he has collected $20,000 from political-action committees representing the company. In South Dakota, GOP Rep. John Thune, who is challenging Sen. Tim Johnson, has found himself in the position of designating all of his WorldCom contributions to a Sioux Falls domestic-violence shelter.

Meanwhile, President Bush himself facing embarrassing questions about disclosure of a 1990 stock sale has wasted no opportunity to criticize WorldCom. He used an appearance at a fund-raiser for an endangered Republican moderate, Rep. Connie Morella of Maryland, to vow that “our Justice Department will hold people accountable,” adding: “We expect high standards in our schools; we expect high standards in corporate America as well.” The Securities and Exchange Commission, which in the Bush years has hardly been known for its aggressiveness, launched a civil fraud complaint against the company.

But Republicans nonetheless seem on the defensive. Two House Republicans are asking questions about the SEC’s examination of accounting practices at Tyco International, WorldCom, Global Crossing, Qwest Communications and Xerox. The lawmakers, Billy Tauzin of Louisiana, who is the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, and James Greenwood of Pennsylvania, who heads an influential oversight subcommittee, believe the agency responsible for corporate oversight is itself guilty of overlooking corporate mischief.

Just Monday, the Joint Center on Regulatory Studies run by the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution released a report with a disturbing conclusion: The new scandals underline problems with enforcing accounting and auditing standards, not problems with the standards themselves. In short, what we have here is a failure to regulate.

This is bad news for the GOP, which has been in power for only 18 months but is frequently linked in the public’s mind with the interests of corporations. Indeed, the study finds that the regulation is too prone to political influence and that rulemaking the complex process that results in the promulgation of regulations is driven more by politics than by substance.

That’s why President Bush (M.B.A. Harvard ’75) has been so quick to call for a quick and aggressive investigation into WorldCom, one which will, as he put it, “hold people accountable.” The administration has not discouraged its allies from making allusions to Theodore Roosevelt, another turn-of-the-century Republican from a patrician political family who took on big business at a time when his party was in the thrall of manufacturers and others whom his cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, would come to call malefactors of great wealth. (This despite the fact that for months Karl Rove, the president’s political adviser, had been talking of the modern age as the 21st-century version of the age of William McKinley.)

So far the Bush strategy has worked. A Gallup Organization poll taken for USAToday and CNN found that most Americans aren’t blaming the president for the accounting scandals. But the frequency with which the president asserts his outrage is a measure of how hard he is trying to distance himself from the companies and executives involved in the scandals.

The Democrats, meanwhile, are sowing the notion that the GOP is too close to business interests and pushing, as Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota put it in a letter to the president, to insert criminal fraud provisions in an accounting bill the Senate is to take up this week.

The effect of the accounting scandals may be to influence a handful of political contests by a point or two, perhaps enough to tip the balance in a year in which politics itself is governed by a precarious balance. But these scandals, taken in a broader context that includes the government reorganization in the wake of the terrorist attacks and the overhaul of the campaign-finance system, suggest that eventually historians might pin an unlikely label on this period: an age of reform.