Bush Approval Another NEW Low 33%

I'm sure someone will be along with a different more reliable poll to show he's the most popular president ever and dines with Jesus.

see what I mean? according to this poll a whole 37% of the country approves of dub. He's actually MR. POPULARITY :wink:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11843383/

Poll: Americans slightly favor plan to censure

RAW STORY
Published: Thursday March 16, 2006

A new poll finds that a slim majority of Americans favor plans to censure President George W. Bush, while a surprising 42% favor moves to actually impeach the President.

A poll taken March 15, 2006 by American Research Group found that among all adults, 46% favor Senator Russ Feingold's (D-WI) plan to censure President George W. Bush, while just 44% are opposed. Approval of the plan grows slightly when the sample is narrowed to voters, up to 46% in favor of the Senate censuring the sitting president.

Even more shocking is that just 57% of Republicans are opposed to the move, with 14% still undecided and 29% actually in favor. Fully 70% of Democrats want to see Bush censured.

More surprising still: The poll found fully 43% of voters in favor of actually impeaching the President, with just 50% of voters opposed. While only 18% of Republicans surveyed wanted to see Bush impeached, 61% of Democrats and 47% of Independents reported they wanted to see the House move ahead with the Conyers (D-MI) resolution.

The poll, taken March 13-15, had a 3% margin of error.

The Bush Legacy

Mar 16th 2006
From The Economist print edition


It may last a lot longer than you think

GEORGE BUSH still has just over a thousand days left in the White House?-about as long as the Kennedy presidency. Yet as far as many people are concerned he's halfway out of the door. Republicans in Congress have started breaking ranks, most spectacularly over foreign (ie, Arab) ownership of American ports; conservative intellectuals have started lobbing hand grenades (the venerable William Buckley recently branded the Iraq war a "failure"); and would-be successors have started measuring the White House curtains.

None of which is surprising. Mr Bush's poll numbers are dismal. The White House staff is accident-prone (one recently departed domestic adviser just got arrested for shoplifting). And presidential campaigns have to start early when the entry ticket costs $100m. But anyone who thinks that the Bush era is over should pick up a biography of Ronald Reagan.

In 1987 the National Journal?-the bible of the Beltway crowd?-ran the headline "Reagan now viewed as an irrelevant president". The failure to get Robert Bork onto the Supreme Court, the stockmarket crash, the Iran-contra affair, Reagan's advanced age?-all bespoke irrelevance. Yet Reagan not only went on to regalvanise his presidency with a foreign-policy coup (the end of the cold war, more or less); he also became a "consequential president"?-a man with a substantial legacy. Mr Bush looks unlikely to pull off a coup of Reaganesque proportions. But he is still shaping policy aggressively on all sorts of fronts?-and his legacy could be much bigger than people realise.

This is partly because the White House is still doing a lot of conservatism by stealth. The New York Times recently pointed out that, behind the scenes, the administration is continuing to make steady advances?-particularly through its control over powerful executive agencies. The Food and Drug Administration is holding up over-the-counter sales of the "morning-after pill". The Environmental Protection Agency is delaying green projects by insisting on cost-benefit analyses. And the Bureau of Land Management is making it easier to drill for oil and gas on public lands. Across the nation feminists and greens are hopping mad, whilst oilmen are punching holes in the virgin soil: what could be more conservative than that?

Looking at the broader picture, Mr Bush's critics tend to see his legacy entirely in negative terms. They have a point. Whoever succeeds him will have to clean up not just Iraq but the deficit. In fiscal terms, moving into the White House in 2009 will be like inheriting a mansion from a drunk uncle: it's a nice house, but the roof is falling in and there's nothing in the bank. But if you can force yourself to look beyond the administration's proven incompetence, Mr Bush has also done more positive things to steer his successor's hand both at home and abroad.

Abroad, even allowing for the disaster in Iraq, something will surely survive of the Bush doctrine. Future presidents may not want to rush into pre-emptive attempts to democratise the Middle East. But America will continue to be hyper-sensitive to the potential nexus between terrorist groups and WMD. It will continue to engage in a complex struggle with radical Islam. And it will continue to be the world's de facto policeman. The biggest challenge facing Mr Bush's successors will not be to junk his foreign policy but to tame it and implement it more competently.

At home, Mr Bush's legacy in domestic policy will be more than just red ink. His No Child Left Behind Act, which tries to introduce accountability in public education by measuring performance and punishing failure, is likely to survive his departure, if only because it draws on ideas with bipartisan support. Mr Bush has also helped promote school vouchers. One scheme provides $70m to send 1,700 Washingtonians to private, mainly religious schools for the next five years; Congress has also passed a $500m voucher scheme for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Any Democrat running for president will doubtless criticise these programmes (to suck up to teachers' unions); but it will be hard to axe them without a fuss from thousands of poor parents.

Mr Bush has also changed the judiciary dramatically?-not just by appointing John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court but also by filling about a quarter of the places on federal appeals courts with conservatives. You can quibble with this achievement. Mr Bush had plenty of help: the conservative movement has been minting little Robertses and Alitos for 40 years. It is also true that he took an unfortunate diversion, signposted Harriet Miers. And Messrs Roberts and Alito may turn out to be less conservative than people think. But the betting is that Mr Bush has reshaped the judiciary for a generation.



George and Karl's excellent adventure
Finally, there is the political legacy. Mr Bush and his main political adviser, Karl Rove, hit on a political formula that succeeded in holding the right together while appealing to just enough moderates to win elections. Small-government conservatives resent his spending, but cutting middle-class entitlements (alas) guarantees electoral failure. Fiscal conservatives resent his deficits, but middle Americans love their tax cuts (the Democrats may condemn his tax cuts as being sops for the rich, but they have also voted to prolong some of his "temporary" cuts). Libertarians resent Mr Bush's social conservatism, but libertarianism is a philosophy for the salons, not suburban living rooms. Paleo-conservatives regard him as a wuss on immigration, but the Republicans would be insane to alienate Latinos. None of this is pretty, not much of it is principled, but it works.

The Bush formula will be picked apart over the next thousand days?-especially if the White House stumbles on from disaster to disaster. But any Republican who wants to put together a ruling government coalition will find that they have no choice but to put the formula back together.

It's stealthy conservatism, gang, unless someone pulls the covers back -- the Democrats and the Media are emulating that bird in Australia. I mean, what average American reads The Economist or Foreign Affairs?

John Whitesides, Political Correspondent Thu Mar 16, 12:32 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Deep doubts about the
Iraq war and pessimism about America's future have shattered public confidence in
President George W. Bush and helped drive his approval ratings to their lowest level ever, pollsters say.


As Bush launched a series of speeches to drum up support for the war, a new round of opinion polls found growing skepticism about Iraq and distrust of Bush. His image declined sharply, with one poll finding "incompetent" to be the most frequent description of his leadership.

Bush's approval rating dipped as low as 33 percent in one recent poll after a string of bad news for the White House, including uproars over a now-dead Arab port deal, a secret eavesdropping program, a series of ethics scandals involving high-profile Republicans and a bungled response to Hurricane Katrina.

The political storm has left Bush's second-term legislative agenda in tatters, threatened Republican control of the U.S. Congress in November's elections and shredded his personal image as an effective leader.

"His strong points as a president were being seen as personally credible, as a strong leader. That has all but disappeared," said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center, whose latest independent poll found a dramatic decline in Bush's credibility.

A majority of Americans, 56 percent, believe Bush is "out of touch," the poll found. When asked for a one-word description of Bush, the most frequent response was "incompetent," followed by "good," "idiot" and "liar." In February 2005, the most frequent reply was "honest."

"The transformation from being seen as honest to being seen as incompetent is an extraordinary indicator of how far he has fallen," Kohut said.

Bush's slump is deep enough to put Republican majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives at risk, pollsters said. Democrats must gain 15 House seats and six Senate seats to regain power in each chamber.

"It's not the environment that we want to be running in," Republican pollster David Winston said. "Republicans can still hold the House and the Senate, but it's becoming increasingly more complicated."

In a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, 61 percent said the Iraq war would be a very important or the most important issue in deciding their vote for Congress. As the third anniversary of the invasion approaches, they preferred Democrats over Republicans in handling Iraq by 48 to 40 percent.

WAR 'A BIG ISSUE'

"I think it is a big issue," House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio said. "When the country is at war there is a certain unsettling that occurs with people around the country, as you might expect."

Boehner said the anxiety over Iraq was coloring the public's view on other issues like the economy, which he said is performing well.

"People don't look at the president's handling of the economy very well, and frankly I think it is a result of this anxiety over the fact that we are at war," he said.

A recent CBS poll found 66 percent of the public believed the country was headed down the wrong track, while a Harris Interactive poll put the number at 60 percent.

Views on Iraq and the war on terrorism were equally pessimistic, with 67 percent of respondents in the CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll saying Bush did not have a clear plan for handling Iraq.

Independent pollster Dick Bennett of American Research Group said Bush's failure to acknowledge public anxieties added to his troubles.

"The biggest problem the White House faces is reconnecting with people. People simply aren't buying it anymore," Bennett said. "People can see for themselves that things actually are not fine."

Bush's ratings are still above historical lows recorded since Gallup started presidential polling after World War Two.

The approval ratings for Harry Truman, Jimmy Carter,
Richard Nixon and the first
George Bush, the current president's father, all dropped into the 20s.

Seeing Baghdad, Thinking Saigon

Stephen Biddle
From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006

Summary: Most discussions of U.S. policy in Iraq assume that it should be informed by the lessons of Vietnam. But the conflict in Iraq today is a communal civil war, not a Maoist "people's war," and so those lessons are not valid. "Iraqization," in particular, is likely to make matters worse, not better.

Stephen Biddle is a Senior Fellow in Defense Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of Military Power.


THE GRAND DELUSION

Contentious as the current debate over Iraq is, all sides seem to make the crucial assumption that to succeed there the United States must fight the Vietnam War again -- but this time the right way. The Bush administration is relying on an updated playbook from the Nixon administration. Pro-war commentators argue that Washington should switch to a defensive approach to counterinsurgency, which they feel might have worked wonders a generation ago. According to the antiwar movement, the struggle is already over, because, as it did in Vietnam, Washington has lost hearts and minds in Iraq, and so the United States should withdraw.

But if the debate in Washington is Vietnam redux, the war in Iraq is not. The current struggle is not a Maoist "people's war" of national liberation; it is a communal civil war with very different dynamics. Although it is being fought at low intensity for now, it could easily escalate if Americans and Iraqis make the wrong choices.

Unfortunately, many of the policies dominating the debate are ill adapted to the war being fought. Turning over the responsibility for fighting the insurgents to local forces, in particular, is likely to make matters worse. Such a policy might have made sense in Vietnam, but in Iraq it threatens to exacerbate the communal tensions that underlie the conflict and undermine the power-sharing negotiations needed to end it. Washington must stop shifting the responsibility for the country's security to others and instead threaten to manipulate the military balance of power among Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds in order to force them to come to a durable compromise. Only once an agreement is reached should Washington consider devolving significant military power and authority to local forces.

BALANCE OF ARTICLE LINK