How low can Bush numbers go?
MARGARET CARLSON
SYNDICATED COLUMNIST
The latest CBS News poll has support for the president and his vice president dropping to 34 percent and 18 percent, respectively. If you add them together and divide by 2, you get a joint approval rating of 26 percent, 2 points above Richard Nixon's pre-resignation level.
How did George W. Bush drop so low? There are many moving parts: Gas prices are high, pensions are fading and the working class is struggling.
There are events that make it look like the fix is in for those in power: Halliburton caught but not punished for gouging the military, a drug bill benefiting drug companies, a Bush crony who is governor of Mississippi getting Katrina reconstruction money while New Orleans gets stiffed.
And there is, of course, the war.
For all these troubles, and many more, Bush would be doing better if he hadn't lost his ear. Gone is the man who picked up the bullhorn at ground zero, replaced by someone so clueless about the Dubai ports deal that he admitted he was out of the loop on the decision and then stubbornly went on to defend it.
Rovie, you're not doing one heckuva job. The Old Bush would have announced he was going to get to the bottom of the Dubai decision now that he was on the case. He would have feigned alarm, if not felt it, that a company owned by the country that was home to two of the 9/11 hijackers, and that recognized the Taliban but not Israel, would be doing business at six major U.S. ports.
Instead he gave his ace in the hole, 9/11, to others to play, and vowed to use his first veto to bat down any attempt to second-guess him. As his own party balked, he said he would let the 45-day review that the law requires take place after all, so Congress could come to see the facts as he does.
With 70 percent of the populace against the ports deal, the Old Bush wouldn't have let opponents be labeled racist xenophobes who are too unsophisticated to understand the nuances of global trade. I hear you, he would say, and I'm going to get to the bottom of this. Then he could have proceeded to do the deal anyway without the hemorrhaging.
But it's not just ports where Bush has gone tone deaf. He has so lost his touch on Iraq that even the military is turning against him.
In a recent Zogby poll, only 23 percent of the troops agree with Bush that we should stay as long as necessary; 72 percent want out in a year.
With that goes one of Bush's most useful lines of defense. Whenever criticized for his policies in Iraq, Bush claimed the troops on the ground were with him, while taking a swipe at the patriotism of critics for undermining the troops.
Indeed, until now, the troops were with him, as you would expect. If you're risking your life in Iraq and have no choice about it, you believe it's for a worthy cause, or go crazy. If a friend dies, you have to believe it wasn't in vain. It's why there are fewer grieving parents against the war and more who cling to the notion that a child died for a good reason.
Our troops realize that the so-called Iraqi forces fighting alongside them aren't rising to the task at hand. No matter what Bush says, the number of battle-ready Iraqi battalions is somewhere around zero. Even among the Iraqi police and troops who can shoot straight and don't run away when attacked, there are imposters and infiltrators.
What's worse, now that sectarian violence has increased, it's hard to tell who's an enemy or a friend. Iraqis who used to live side by side are attacking each other on the basis of sect alone. Americans are in the middle.
Bush's own hand-picked intelligence czar, John Negroponte, predicts that the sect-on-sect violence unleashed in Iraq is so virulent it could inflame the whole Middle East. Instead of spreading democracy in the Middle East by invading Iraq, the U.S. may well be spreading civil war.
It's a mess, and if we're waiting for it to get straightened out before leaving, we are there for many, many years.
But Bush hasn't changed his rhetoric to fit the situation. In an interview on ABC last week, he defaulted to his two bromides on the war -- when Iraqis stand up, we will stand down, and the elections show that democracy is working. He even said, "We're making pretty good progress." With the mosques still burning and a curfew still in effect, that's in the category of Mission Accomplished.
If the military support is softening, it joins Bush's other constituencies in going wobbly. Bush is losing ground among his most loyal constituency, Republicans, where his approval may be lower than 34 percent if two obsessively loyal congressional leaders, Sen. Bill Frist and Rep. Dennis Hastert, fearlessly denouncing his Dubai decision are any indication.
It could be lower in the public at large, as well. I wonder how many of the 34 percent don't want to admit to a stranger on the phone how worried they are. "Fine, he's doing fine. Now don't call me again."
Of course, the religious right, enjoying rapture over Justice Samuel Alito, is still on board. That makes up 20 percent. So I'm going with the unscientific Carlson poll at 26 percent, splitting the difference between Bush's number and Cheney's.
Margaret Carlson is a columnist for Bloomberg News;
[email protected].
Brandon better start learning how to make hamburgers for McDonald's.
