Monday, June 30, 2008

Wishful Thinking in Bush Land: President Convinced Public Will Love Him After All

It's take more than seven years, but the American public has finally realized that George W. Bush has been a disaster as president.

The list of Bush errors and deceptions is long and serious, from an elective and trumped up war against a nation that did not attack us and a bungled Iraqi reconstruction effort to prisoner abuse and torture and illegal spying on U.S. citizens.

And then there's the domestic arena, where the White House bungled the Katrina response ("Heckva job, Brownie!"), worked to politicize the Justice Department, and ignored scientific evidence on global warming and a host of other topics.

And let's not even get started on gas prices, which some in the Administration predicted would go down as a result of a stable, democratic Iraq. What a joke.

It's no surprise, then, that Bush's approval ratings are in the toilet, among the lowest in the history of presidential polling. Despite such reports, the president and his aides remain optimistic that Bush will rise the eyes of the public.

Here's the latest fiction from an administration in denial, courtesy of U.S. News:

When he travels around the country, Bush feels less “antipathy” than he used to in the crowds, along the motorcade routes, and expressed by the individuals who talk to him at his events. “He feels there has been a shift in attitudes out there that’s not reflected in polling data,” the aide says. […]

Reinforcing his point, the latest AP-Ipsos poll, released in mid-June, found that only 29 percent of Americans approved of Bush’s job performance, one of the lowest presidential ratings ever. White House officials, by the way, say they aren’t sure such polls should be believed because the questions are biased and the population samples are flawed.

2 comments:

Savage Baptist said...

Y'know, again, I have my differences with the Bush administration. He should've gotten a declaration of war, not the "authorization to use force" type of thing he got. It's idiotic to think that instituting Western-style representative government in the Middle East will be the work of anything less than decades. He's increased spending and doubled the size of government. He's refused to enforce the border to any discernible degree.

I mean, I'm not real wild about the guy, so I understand the low polling numbers.

But I can't help but note that his numbers--again, still, this has been very consistent, doesn't change, etc.--trump your Democratically-controlled Congress's 18.5% approval rating. It's harder to find current data about Nancy Pelosi specifically, or about Harry Reid, but what I have seen indicates that they typically have been holding steady at about 24% and 19% approval, respectively, both noticeably lower than Bush.

My question to you is: If Bush is delusional about the reality of his 29 % approval rating, is a Democratically-controlled Congress delusional if it thinks the public supports it, despite approval ratings of 19 percent?

Anonymous said...

The greater dissatisfaction with Congress is due to their not putting the brakes on Bush, as the new Dems were elected to do. I'm highly dissatisfied with them, too. But I had positive expectations for Congress, and none at all for Bush. Thus the difference.

Even GOP strategists anticipate a blowout for the Democrats this year. If the Dems get a substantial majority in the Senate, rather than the current razor-thin one, they may be able to begin to roll back some of the damage done by Bush and the GOP.