President Barack Obama's top US Senate ally signaled Wednesday that Democrats hope former president George W. Bush will be their shield against voter anger at the economy in the November 2012 elections.

"I do think the presidential election will be based on what took place in the Bush administration, how we tried to recover from that," Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said in remarks as lawmakers convened.

Reid said grim economic conditions -- unquestionably Obama's greatest weakness and the most dire threat to his push for a second term -- were "exacerbated" by the tsunami in Japan and Europe's rampaging debt crisis.

Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has declared his party has no greater mission than Obama's defeat, derided the Democratic argument as "it's anybody's fault but mine" three years into the Democrat's term.

"In addition to the previous administration, it was the tsunami in Japan, it's the European debt crisis, it's those millionaires, it's those people in Wall Street, in short, it's everybody's fault but ours," McConnell mocked.

"And that is the argument you're left with when you're going into an election year, facing the American people, and you have got nothing else to say," said the Republican lawmaker.

While the 2007-2008 global economic meltdown began under Bush, Republicans have accused Obama of making things worse with what they dismiss as a failed economic stimulus bill in 2009 and his calls for higher taxes on the wealthy.

"We have got 1.3 million fewer jobs in this country than we had" when Obama signed the $800 billion plan, said McConnell, who rejected raising taxes "on the very people we're counting on to jolt this economy back to life."

But independent analysts at the Congressional Budget Office -- the non-partisan arbiter of Washington's budget battles -- have said that the stimulus package increased employment by up to 3.3 million jobs.

And studies of Washington's vast budget deficits blame the shortfall chiefly on the economic downturn, as well as items like massive Bush-era tax cuts and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.