Gains failing to inspire consumer confidence.

The U.S. economy has created 1.2 million jobs since December. Personal income is up 5.7 percent from a year ago. The economy may grow this year by the most in two decades, and once-skeptical economists at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Merrill Lynch & Co. now say the expansion is firm.

Homer Maceo doesn't buy it.

"The numbers just don't match my reality," said Maceo, a 41-year-old sales clerk from Annapolis, Md.

Business at the travel store where he works hasn't yet returned to the heyday of 2000, the year before terrorist attacks and an eight-month recession. "It's gotten worse for me."

Maceo's view illustrates the conundrum facing President Bush in this year's election campaign: The best economic figures in years aren't translating into gains in consumer confidence or voter approval.

Pollsters and campaign advisers say Americans are skeptical in part because they're paying more for gasoline and mortgages, stock indexes have done little this year, and U.S. soldiers are still dying in Iraq. In addition, it took the economy 22 months after the latest recession to start adding jobs.

"Recessions are kind of like garbage trucks--they still smell even after they've driven by," said economist Ed McKelvey of Goldman Sachs.

For all the recent job-growth, the economy still is 1.6 million jobs below the level of employment before Bush took office. In manufacturing, the gap is wider: Employment is still 2.7 million below its level of January 2001. Labor-linked groups say the jobs that are being created pay less than those than have been lost.

The latest Gallup Organization poll showed 65 percent of Americans responding said the economy was "fair" or "poor." The survey was taken June 3 through June 6, a timeframe that included the latest Labor Department report showing 947,000 jobs have been added since March. Fifty-eight percent of likely voters said they disapproved of Bush's handling the economy.

Among the up-arrows: The economy expanded by 5 percent during the 12 months ended in March, the most in two decades. Housing starts soared 20 percent in the 12 months ended in April, matching the largest rise in almost a decade. Business investment is up 5.1 percent from its level of a year ago.

Richard Berner, chief U.S. economist at Morgan Stanley & Co., said in a letter to clients June 7 he believed the U.S. recovery had turned a corner a few months ago. "There's no longer any doubt about the sustainability of the U.S. economic recovery," he wrote.

There's one reason that helps explain the disparity between professionals and the public: "Voters aren't economists and they don't watch the monthly indicators," said Barry P. Bosworth, a Brookings Institution economist in Washington who served as director of the President's Council on Wage and Price Stability during the Jimmy Carter administration.

There's always a lag between the time an economy begins to expand and the time ordinary Americans begin to see it in their own lives, Bosworth said. "Right now, the job growth hasn't continued long enough to make a really deep imPression."

That's what Ed Sarpolus, a Michigan pollster who has worked for both Republicans and Democrats, says he is finding. In a poll taken the week ended May 6, more than 60 percent of Michigan voters surveyed said they were dissatisfied with the state's economy and the way Bush was handling the nation's economy.

"They aren't personally experiencing what the statistics say," Sarpolus said. "Every time they hear the economy nationally is creating new jobs, they see a headline in the local paper that says one of the local plants here is thinking about more layoffs.'

Labor-linked groups also have raised questions about the quality of the jobs that have been created this year. The Economic Policy Institute in Washington said in a report that many of the new jobs are low-wage slots, paying an average of 13 percent below those that have been lost.

John E. Silvia, chief economist at Wachovia Corp. in Charlotte, N.C., disputes such claims, arguing that most of the new jobs have come in higher-paying fields such as business and professional services.