As the second year of his administration takes shape, a president who responded so forcefully to a surprise attack on America boasts a dismal record on economic issues ranging from business regulation to his handling of the economy.

Consider how hollow and halting the president's inaugural words sound today. "Most of our financial laws are the outgrowth of experience and trial, and should not be amended without investigation and demonstration of the wisdom of the proposed changes," he cautioned. "We must be both sure we are right and make haste slowly."

That's not George W. Bush speaking. It's William McKinley. And this is hardly the first time those two have been compared.

It was Bush political guru Karl Rove who repeatedly compared the 2000 Bush-Al Gore election with the 1896 contest that pitted business-friendly McKinley against populist William Jennings Bryan. Rove hopes Bush's election will commence a long period of Republican dominance, as McKinley's victory did.

For all his historical analogizing during the campaign, however, Rove has been curiously quiet about comparing the policies of the two administrations. And maybe that's because Rove knows that the eerie similarities between the two presidencies paint a less-than-flattering picture of his boss.

Upon taking office, McKinley and Bush both faced trying economic circumstances. McKinley's America had just begun to emerge from a financial panic and catastrophic depression that featured higher unemployment rates than the nation would experience at the lowest ebb of the Great Depression. Bush inherited a generally healthy but cooling economy, one that has since suffered from revelations of financial "malfeance" - as the president recently called it - by corporate and accounting executives.

Both presidents were properly viewed as the favored candidates of business interests over labor. Both espoused laissez faire economic philosophies that left each in the difficult position of arguing to do less, not more, to solve the economic problems of their administrations.

But the most striking similarity between the two administrations is the unexpected shift in focus to foreign affairs in response to a surprise attack. The mysterious sinking of the American battleship Maine in the waters off Spanish-occupied Cuba in February 1898 drew McKinley into a publicly supported, congressionally declared war with Spain. The arc of Bush's administration was, of course, forever altered Sept. 11.

With the nation on war footing, both presidents proceeded to drag their feet on economic issues.

On the most vexing economic question of his day - the incestuous corporate trust-building by the Harrimans, Morgans and Rockefellers - McKinley balked. To the glee of the robber baron set, the Supreme Court in 1895 diluted the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act, saying that a sugar-refining concern that controlled 98 percent of the market was not a monopoly. Rather than spend his newfound political capital on trust-busting, McKinley mostly paid lip service to the issue.

Borrowing from the same playbook, Bush's speech last month to Wall Street on the need for corporate responsibility was widely derided as long on words and short on proposed action. His tone has since become more forceful; on Tuesday, Bush signed legislation passed by Congress to strengthen corporate fraud regulations, though it included provisions he had previously opposed. The White House then turned around and quietly issued an interpretation that stripped much of the protection that bill provides corporate whistle-blowers.

With one in six Americans questioning his credibility on this issue, Bush is reacting rather than leading. His last aggressive move came a few months ago when he opposed increases for Securities and Exchange Commission oversight. That the same House Republicans who repeatedly thwarted President Bill Clinton's attempts during the 1990s to enact corporate responsibility standards are suddenly running ahead of Bush on these issues says everything about this president's paralysis.

Another major issue in the late 1890s was fiscal solvency, and "Ohio's Idol" raised import tariffs rather than increase further the already unpopular sin taxes on alcohol and tobacco. "W" cut taxes because to him tax-cutting is the solution to just about every economic problem - government surpluses, government deficits, whatever. Both men avoided administering castor oil solutions, but at least McKinley - in the days before the income tax - proposed alternative revenues to keep the country in the black, whereas Bush blithely pretends that the $1.7 trillion in lost revenues over the next decade will somehow not be missed.

The argument over bimetallism - whether silver should join gold in backing our currency - also divided America at the turn of the 20th century. Defending Eastern and Northern reliance on the gold-only standard, McKinley appointed councils to study the issue as he again sat on his hands. The hedge worked: His new import tariffs increased American gold reserves, dropping the price of silver by decade's end and clearing the path for passage of the Gold Standard Act of 1900.

There is no obvious parallel issue to bimetallism facing Bush today, but rather a menu of underlying macroeconomic problems about which the 43rd president remains deafeningly silent: huge trade deficits; mounting consumer debt; our embarrassing national savings rate - take your pick.

These presidents also share a cautious, even diffident penchant to delegate important decisions. McKinley gave his first vice president, Garret A. Hobart, unprecedented influence in his administration. Before chronic heart problems killed him in 1899, Hobart's short but crucial service earned him the label "assistant president." Dick Cheney, meanwhile, is arguably the first de facto prime minister of the United States, and the first vice president to maintain offices on both sides of the Capitol to best steward the president's legislative agenda. Let's hope his ticker remains strong.

Rove could not have foreseen the terrorist attacks. But as an avid McKinley buff, he knew exactly what to do on the economic home front, given the long leash of public approval for his homeland security actions post-Sept. 11 - nothing. When Rove was caught last fall confessing his plans to parlay Bush's popularity into domestic victories, rather than talk of fundamental transformations the focus remained on moving the ball upfield on losing summer 2001 issues like the faith-based initiative.

Two presidents a century apart found themselves at important crossroads in U.S. history. Both were confronted by a sudden attack on America, and both enjoyed unusually high levels of public support for their responses. McKinley died popular, but left a mess of unresolved issues, including wage disparities and labor unrest that would feed fascist and socialist movements in the coming decades.

Rove, it seems, was more right - in both senses of the term - than he knew when he dazzled the press with his historical comparisons of McKinley and Bush. Indeed, Bush now seems doomed, almost determined, to repeat a presidential history marked by diffident avoidance of the immediate and long-term economic challenges confronting the nation. Though he still can reverse field, the president and his historian-adviser appear content to balk at this historic opportunity.

McKinley had a Rove-like guru of his own: a Cleveland industrialist with keen political instincts named Mark Hanna.

Historians disagree about whether Hanna was McKinley's puppetmaster, but there's no disputing that Hanna helped raise and spend $3.5 million for the 1896 campaign - an amount that, in today's dollars, was as much at Bush spent in 2000. The biggest McKinley contributor was America's first great oilman, John D. Rockefeller.

Hanna took pains to carefully package McKinley's message, which the former congressman and governor delivered in front-porch speeches from his home in Canton, Ohio. Questioners were screened to prevent the embarrassing of McKinley, who was as elusive as Bush was on campaign trains, planes and automobiles during the 2000 campaign.

Rove conveniently ignores that McKinley left the unresolved issue of corporate accumulation of power in the lap of his successor, Theodore Roosevelt. Bush, who reportedly read Edmund Morris' latest volume of biography of Roosevelt, should know that Teddy built his reputation by courageously resisting Sen. Hanna and his allies in Congress and on Wall Street by breaking up the steel and railroad trusts that were suffocating competition and angering America's working classes. In fact, it was probably Roosevelt's standing up to big business - "saving capitalism from itself" - that led to the Republican realignment for the first third of the 20th century, not McKinley's laissez-faire policies.

McKinley's presidency and life were cut short by an assassin's bullet in 1901. No person of sound mind would wish a similar fate upon Bush. But at least McKinley's death came after he won a landslide re-election in the 1900 rematch with the populist-preaching opponent he defeated four years earlier. That bit of electoral history Rove would love to repeat. But if Bush continues to plod along his current path of cross-fingered neglect, the president with whom Rove and other historians will be comparing W is neither McKinley nor Roosevelt, but the chief executive with whom he shares the most obvious similarity of all - his surname.

Thomas Schaller is an assistant professor in the political science department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.