WASHINGTON — So will the president focus more on Wall Street's lipstick index or Teddy Roosevelt's big-stick index?

The lipstick index is a way to judge a recession. When the economy goes down, lipstick sales go up. Women
indulge in smaller luxuries and skip bigger ones. The big-stick index is a way conservatives judge the president.
Will W. whack Saddam with the stick, or will he fold, the way his dad did?

Mr. Bush spent his first year using his father's failures as a reverse playbook. Trying to dodge 41's mistakes, 43
catered to Congressional right- wingers and muscled through a mammoth tax cut. When the economy slumped,
he took great pains to tell Americans he understood their pain — so he would not seem oblivious and wrapped up
in foreign affairs like his father.  Then Sept. 11 hit and he had to get wrapped up in foreign affairs.

If the president uses the reverse playbook now, and continues to coddle the conservatives his father neglected,
he has to go topple the wacky Iraqi, completing Poppy's unfinished business. But if he does that, he turns his
attention away from the recession, repeating Poppy's mistake after his war, when he never used his celestial
approval ratings to fix the economy.

It's a surreal Oedipal loop de loop, made all the loopier by the spectacle of history repeating itself and putting
the son at the same juncture where his father made two of the most critical and criticized decisions of his presidency.
Because 41 detached from Baghdad and detached from economic angst at home, 43 is under extra pressure to
attack Iraq while attacking the recession.

The man who started out as the most disengaged president in modern history is now being pestered by his aides
and his conservative base to engage, engage, engage. His political and military advisers are competing for his attention,
as he decides how hotly to pursue the war at a time when the economy is foundering and deficits are back.
It is a measure of how nervous the White House is, given Republican losses in the recent gubernatorial elections,
that it dumped Gov. James Gilmore of Virginia as party chief last week.

Should the president rout Osama and the Taliban and then "focus like a laser beam on this economy," as Bill
Clinton said when he beat Bush senior? Or should he go on to Phase Two, as the Get Saddam crowd calls it,
now that the U.S. is "on a roll," as State Department official Richard Armitage puts it?
At the moment, Mr. Bush is juggling furiously.

In his Saturday radio address, the president concentrated on the recession and expressed concern about soaring unemployment. "It's a time to reach out to Americans who are hurting," he said, "to help them put food on the table
and to keep a roof over their heads."  And, if Mr. Bush has not yet decided whether to crack Saddam with the big stick,
he has been talking more loudly anyway. He said if Iraq did not allow U.N. inspectors into the country to check for
weapons of mass destruction, it would "find out" the consequences.

It's hard to say if the swagger was meant to co-opt the string of Perles — Richard Perle and others who are in
full cry to crush Saddam — or to lay a real groundwork for at least bombing Iraq. It is curious that the president
tolerates such open provocation from people in his administration and connected to it, given that the clamor sets him up
to look soft on Saddam if he doesn't go after Iraq.

Paul Wolfowitz, the No. 2 Pentagon official, has been the spark plug of the Get Saddam club. Other
drum-beaters are Mr. Perle, on a Pentagon advisory board, and fellow board member James Woolsey, who
went on a government plane with a team from Justice and Defense to investigate whether Iraq was involved in
the 9-11 attacks.

"If we cannot drive this tyrant from office," Mr. Perle said on CNN, "then we can't do anything."
In an interview with Bob Novak and Al Hunt on CNN Saturday, Donald Rumsfeld was asked about Mr. Perle's agitations.
"Look, Richard Perle is Richard Perle," he replied, praising Mr. Perle but adding: "He does not speak for the
president. He does not speak for me."

So many voices, so little time. It's enough to send a president burrowing back into his feather pillow.