Mr. Bush will spend Saturday as the host of an extraordinary emergency meeting of international finance ministers at the White House. For him, the economic turmoil is the financial equivalent of 9/11  a bookend to a presidency that has grappled with challenges brought on by terrorists, Mother Nature and two long-running wars. No longer will Iraq be the sole determinant of the Bush legacy; now the president’s fate is tied up in the economy as much as the war.

Mr. Bush has always been confident of himself, even when the American public was not, and that has not changed. Just as he is convinced he did the right thing in Iraq, he is convinced he is doing the right thing on the economy  despite job approval ratings at historic lows and a presidential campaign in which both candidates have used him as kind of a battering ram.

“He seems burdened, and he seems confident,” said David Guernsey, the owner of Guernsey Office Products, who hosted the Chantilly, Va., session. “He seems sort of like a guy who’s saying, ‘Boy, I’m kind of winding this thing down and now this happens, so the next four months are going to be anything but quiet.’ But he seemed very confident that what Bernanke and Paulson and that crowd have put together is the fix.”

Even if burdened, he also has the lightness of a man who knows the burden will soon be lifted. At a closed-door fund-raiser in St. Louis last Friday night, Mr. Bush was humorous and relaxed, said John C. Danforth, the former senator from Missouri, who was there. The president sounded a note about “tough times,” in reference to the economy, and “seemed relieved” that his presidency was nearly over, Mr. Danforth said.

“It was very unusual, I thought,” Mr. Danforth said. “I think it was a man who was relaxed and funny and looked as though he was about to shed this burden of the presidency. In a way, his speech seemed kind of like a valedictory. I took it as though, ‘I’ve done the best I can, I think I made the right decisions and now it’s almost over.’ ”