Washington ? Who is President Bush’s point man on the economy? The question stumps most people. It should be Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, but he has shown no inclination to play a leadership role. White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey has been equally reticent to step forward. And Securities and Exchange Chairman Harvey Pitt, who recently announced that “it would be unthinkable to deprive people of my expertise,” would like to be the designated economic leader, but his past legal representation of Arthur Andersen and other major accounting firms means that his “expertise” may be biased. The result is a worrisome vacuum. In the midst of a steep decline in the stock market, made worse by revelations of corporate accounting scandals, there is nobody in the government who can credibly reassure the nation that the administration has a plan to restore economic health.

Bush tried to cheer up the markets on three separate occasions, and each time he spoke, the Dow Jones average went down. The dollar has now fallen to parity with the Euro for the first time, a blow to the American ego as much as our pocketbook, and there is no end in sight to the decline. Bush was a C-student by his own admission, but he promised to appoint experienced and competent people to his government. He did so at Defense and State, but his choices in the economic area have been surprisingly weak.

This lapse wasn’t noticeable at first. The press was too busy writing about the discipline and efficiency of the White House under the leadership of the first president to hold a master’s degree in business administration. But as Bush struggles to steady the stock market, his business past has placed him under the same cloud as the executives at Enron and WorldCom who cashed in while their companies went belly-up. Entanglements with questionable corporate practices have tarnished Bush, Vice President Cheney (president of Halliburton), Secretary of the Army Thomas White (an Enron vice president) and Deputy Atty. Gen. Larry Thompson (a director of Providian Financial Corp).

Bush came to Washington determined to avoid the mistakes of his father, defeated for a second term because he seemed so uncaring about the economic woes of ordinary Americans. The senior Bush chose a Wall Street Brahmin, Nicholas Brady, for Treasury secretary, a man with his finger on the pulse of his Rolex watch, not middle America. Bush was determined to avoid Wall Street, and instead chose a Main Street Republican in O’Neill, a self-made man who is not part of the patrician elite.

Bush’s motives were admirable, but O’Neill has let him down. He may be plainspoken, but he doesn’t have any more of a grip on the larger economic issues than Brady did. Being a CEO doesn’t necessarily prepare you to be Treasury secretary, and O’Neill’s shortcomings were obvious long before the current wave of corporate scandals. As the head of Alcoa, O’Neill built an impressive record, but his focus was more on worker safety issues than the big picture of superpower macroeconomics.

O’Neill is a staunch opponent of economic intervention who viewed the bankruptcy of Enron as a natural market occurrence, and who still can’t bring himself to say anything nice about the accounting reform. By all accounts, O’Neill’s tenure at Alcoa was unblemished by the kinds of accounting abuses that have come to light at other companies. He could run a business successfully and hold his particular views, but he can’t lead a nation back to economic sanity with an outdated aversion to government regulation.

While other Republicans are racing to get on the reform bandwagon, O’Neill is still defending corporations who register offshore to avoid paying taxes. If Bush wants to be taken seriously as a reformer, he should use the crisis in the stock market to shake up his economic team.

Prediction: The president will throw a Pitt bone to the public, but hold on to O’Neill.