From a post of 3 September:

And as soon as a real economic or foreign crisis hits -- and it will -- the obvious weakness of a leaderless government and the confusion and missteps that will follow will have people longing for the days when a real, articulate executive was in charge, and Bush's numbers will plummet.

From today's news:

On television, in newspapers and in animated discussions in offices across the country, Mr. Bush's conduct was compared unfavorably with that of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York, who went to the scene of the attacks in Lower Manhattan; to John F. Kennedy, who stayed in Washington throughout the Cuban missile crisis of 1963, when many feared that nuclear war was imminent, and to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who remained at the Pentagon after it was hit and for a time helped in the evacuation of the dead and wounded.

The president's conduct, said an article this morning in the staunchly conservative Boston Herald, "did not inspire confidence."