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What exactly is wrong with an optimistic president who has confidence in the long-run future of the American economy?

President Bush took this stance in a recent interview with me and at the Economic Club of New York. He told me: "Like any free market, there's also downturns, and we're in one. But I am confident in the long-term strength of our economy."

Optimism, after all, is one of the few levers our chief executive can use every day. By remaining optimistic, Bush is borrowing a page from Ronald Reagan, and rejecting a whole book of malaise from Jimmy Carter.

Bush is dealing with the housing and mortgage credit virus. But he will avoid anything that will doom future economic growth. He wants to stop overzealous regulatory legislation that will turn the United States back 30 years. And he won't bow to tax hikes and trade protectionism. While the rest of the world is embracing free-market American-style capitalism, he won't lurch left with big-government programs.

Home prices must adjust lower to end the housing downturn. And it's precisely these lower prices that will allow young families to afford new homes. Prices may fall, but homes don't go away. Markets, not government, are the best way to sort this out.

Bush gets all this. And yet he's attacked for his free-market moorings. Liberal columnist Maureen Dowd says he's "plum loco." She and Sen. Charles Schumer call him the new Herbert Hoover.

But let's take a closer look.

It was Hoover who signed the Smoot-Hawley trade-protectionism act and overturned the Coolidge-Mellon tax cuts. These disastrous measures -- along with monetary contraction from a fledgling Federal Reserve -- turned a recession into a depression. FDR didn't help matters, either. His misbegotten tax hikes on successful earners and businesses, and his alphabet agencies to control the industrial and farming sectors, extended the depression and held unemployment near 20 percent.

Today, it's the Hill-Bama Democrats who want to raise taxes on successful producers. And they want to turn protectionist by reopening NAFTA and stopping any new open-trade treaties. Schumer himself has spent years bashing China, threatening the nation with huge tariffs if its currency policies don't conform to demands.

If anyone has resurrected the party of Hoover, it's today's Democrats. They've adopted pessimism as their national pastime, and want us to believe we're already in a long and deep recession.

But not so fast.

The growing export sector is showing considerable strength. So are agriculture, energy, industrials and international infrastructure. The e-forecasting economic service says gross domestic product had a small gain in February and a positive reading of 1.5 percent over the past six months. The economy isn't collapsing. And while it may be flat, there's no deep recession.

Hooveresque monetary contraction? It's not there, either. After numerous Fed easing moves, the three-month growth of the monetary base has shifted from -4 percent last December to 6 percent in mid-March. The broader M2 money supply has registered an 11 percent annual gain over the past three months.

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