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Fri 14 May, 2004 01:50 pm
May 14, 2004
Polls Show Bush's Job-Approval Ratings Sinking
By DAVID E. SANGER
WASHINGTON, May 13 - As President Bush was traveling through the Midwest on his exuberant bus tour last week, his campaign aides still sounded confident that the revelations of how Iraqi prisoners were abused would do far more harm to the United States' image abroad than to the president's standing at home.
But only a week later, at the very moment Mr. Bush's aides had hoped to be basking in the glow of improving economic numbers, months of setbacks in Iraq are clearly taking their toll.
Mr. Bush's job-approval numbers have sunk to all-time lows, with a majority of Americans now saying, for the first time, that the invasion of Iraq was not worth the mounting cost. At the same time, they give the president far higher marks for his execution of the battle against terrorists, even though he has argued that they are all part of one war.
Congress, including prominent conservatives, has grown so restive about the wisdom of Mr. Bush's strategy that on Thursday the deputy secretary of defense, Paul D. Wolfowitz, had to retreat from a Senate hearing when members of both parties demanded far more specifics than he could provide about plans for spending the $25 billion the president is seeking to pursue the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And for the first time, even some of the most loyal administration aides, who have regularly defended every twist in the Iraq strategy, are conceding that the president and his top advisers are stuck in what one of them called "the perpetual debate" about whether to change strategy or soldier on. Mr. Bush's usually sunny campaign advisers make no effort to hide the depth of the problem.
"Look, obviously events and the coverage and what's reported are going to have an effect on how people see the direction of the country," said Matthew Dowd, the chief strategist for Bush-Cheney '04. "In the last two months or three months, there hasn't been a wealth of positive news. It was bound to have an effect, and we expected that."
But Mr. Dowd said that changing Mr. Bush's tone on the campaign trail was not an option. So with some modifications, Mr. Bush is following the script he and his chief political adviser, Karl Rove, drafted as the prisoner scandal emerged: He repeats his disgust with the abuses, then turns the subject immediately back to his broader goals in the war on terrorism, merging it with the action in Iraq. He did so again on Thursday in a West Virginia school gymnasium.
"We're being tested," Mr. Bush said. "People are testing our mettle. And I will not yield to the whims of the few."
After vigorous applause, he added, "I won't yield because I believe so strongly in what we're doing, and I have faith in the power of freedom to spread its wings in parts of the world that desperately need freedom."
Several of Mr. Bush's advisers have said in recent weeks that they believe the bigger mistake for the president would be to show any weakness, or to yield even to those in his own party who may not want to cut and run, but may be interested in moving quickly to the exits after June 30.
And so far, he is under relatively little pressure from his Democratic opponent in the presidential race, Senator John Kerry, to make a major course correction. Mr. Kerry called months ago for greater United Nations participation; for the last few months, Mr. Bush has done the same. And while Mr. Kerry harshly criticized the president on the prison scandal on Wednesday, he has said that a withdrawal from Iraq would be disastrous, and on Thursday he even endorsed, without qualification, Mr. Bush's request for the $25 billion in additional financing.
"The situation in Iraq has deteriorated far beyond what the administration anticipated," Mr. Kerry said in a statement meant to pre-empt any questions about whether he would hedge his support for the additional money, as he did on a larger request last year. "This money is urgently needed, and it is completely focused on the needs of our troops. We must give our troops the equipment and support to carry out their missions in Iraq and Afghanistan."
Mr. Bush's advisers say they have been surprised that their own candidate's decline in the polls has not resulted in an equivalent boost for Mr. Kerry. But several members of Mr. Bush's foreign policy team noted Mr. Kerry's new line of attack on Wednesday, when he said that Mr. Bush's aides "dismiss the Geneva Conventions, starting in Afghanistan and Guantánamo, so that the status of prisoners both legal and moral becomes ambiguous at best."
Some Republicans close to Mr. Bush's campaign are concerned that Mr. Kerry's comments are the beginning of a new effort to fuel the notion that Mr. Bush's take-no-prisoners attitude created the conditions that allowed prisoner abuses to flourish.
"No one in the White House knows if that argument will stick," said one conservative who met with Mr. Bush's aides this week. "Clearly, it worries them. And it should."
Asked about the state of the presidential race on Thursday as he flew back to Washington from Little Rock, Ark., Mr. Kerry was upbeat. Saying there was much work yet to be done, he added, "I'd rather be where we are, growing, than where they are."
The polls out this week found Mr. Bush, by some measures, at the lowest point of his presidency. Only 46 percent of Americans told the Gallup Poll they approved of the way Mr. Bush was handling his job, and a majority, 51 percent, said they disapproved. Other polls had similar results. A poll by the Pew Research Center found that 44 percent of Americans approved of the president's handling of his job and 48 percent disapproved.
Those numbers alarm many of Mr. Bush's supporters, but Mr. Dowd said: "I always counsel people when we are ahead and behind that since this country is very divided, this thing is always going to be played by the 45-yard lines. And we are still in that place."
Perhaps most alarming for Mr. Bush is the public's assessment that things in the United States are not going particularly well, with only 33 percent of the respondents in the Pew poll saying they were satisfied with the way things were going in the country and 61 percent saying they were dissatisfied.
All this comes at a time when the public's support for the war in Iraq is rapidly fading. For the first time since the war began, a majority of respondents in the Gallup poll, 54 percent, said it was not worth going to war in Iraq; 44 percent said it was worth it.
Only 41 percent said they approved of the way Mr. Bush was handling the situation in Iraq, while nearly 6 in 10, or 58 percent, said they disapproved.
Still, despite the failure to find unconventional weapons and the failure to anticipate the rising insurgency, a majority said it was not a mistake to send troops to Iraq in the first place, a critical argument in Mr. Bush's stump speech.
The polls were taken before the beheading of Nicholas E. Berg was made public. The Gallup poll of 1,003 adults was conducted May 7-9; the Pew, of 1,800 adults, was conducted May 3-9. Each poll was conducted nationwide by telephone and had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/14/politics/campaign/14fallout.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1084564061-nPvOltpK3rbIXRIycGRcBw&pagewanted=print&position=
Deecups, I saw another poll that shows Bush's disapproval rating at 51% with the approval rating at the same 46%. I love this trend; his approval rating is sinking faster as we get closer to November.
This is wonderful news to begin a weekend! Yippeeeee!
Hi to All- Newsweek published their poll and Bush is even lower! His approvals are now ar 42%!
Watch for a staged terrorist attack in October, or the sudden capture of UBL in in October, or if all of the aforementioned fail, there's always DieBold for Bush to rely on!
Only one poll counts for anything... and that doesn't happen 'till November.
SealPoet, FYI, the elctions happens in November. Between now and then, there will be many polls taken on Bush's approval and disapproval ratings. What many of us love to see is his approval rating going down, and his disapproval rating going up. That has alot of meaning to many of us whether you think it or not. Trends count. Whether you like it or not, Bush enjoyed an 80 percent approval rating several months ago, it's now below 50 percent. That is SIGNIFICANT!
Where is Kerry's approval rating? Bush's rating can go anywhere it pleases but if Kerry's does not move upward all it means is that many voters will simply hold their noses when they vote Republican in November.
Acquiunk, What you say is true, but under 'normal' circumstances, when Bush poll numbers goes south, Kerry's numbers goes north. Maybe not on a one-to-one ratio, but close enough for polls.
You'll probably enjoy some of the graphs in these two posts ... Bush's approval & disapproval numbers over time, plus how he's doing against Kerry:
link
It it FOX News' job to spin the bad news and ignore the stories that might create a negative picture of Bush and Cheney. This is their mission statement.
greenumbrella:
The way it usually works is, anytime there's an issue that is negatively impacting Bush's approval ratings -- as Abu Ghraib is now, you can trust that FOX News will amp up coverage on meaningless stuff like the Kobe Bryant trail, or a car chase in Los Angeles, or the Scott Peterson trail.
By contrast, when charges were being leveled at former President Clinton that he lied to a special prosecutor about his sex life, well, FOX News was 24/7 on this story, drilling it endless into the psyches of its viewers.
That's why it's important to monitor right-wing propaganda outlets like FOX.
Bush's approval and disapproval numbers are both higher than his IQ. However, they are lower than his blood alcohol content.
Bush's approval and disapproval numbers are both higher than his IQ. However, they are lower than his blood alcohol content.
Hahaha! Oh doglover, you really are a gem! I love it!
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