Conservative economic policies have been successfully sold to the electorate in the past; it would help if the Republicans would at least try here. Nothing was more pathetic than Bush's response to the minimum wage question in the 2004 debate, in which, instead of publicly making the case that the minimum wage hurt the poor and the economy as a whole, he advocated an increase--only one smaller than Kerry's proposal.
That is what bothers me about Bush. He either does not "get it", or he does not have the means to deliver an argument and thus he just folds.