A Plunge Into Shallow Water

Looks like our buddy J.D. Mullane is in over his head again; it would seem so after reading today’s column in the Bucks County Courier Times (and what a class move to make fun of Joe Biden’s “hair enhancement” by the way, J.D. – I was always taught not to ridicule people based on their appearance, though catching them in the act of doing or saying something stupid is fair game).

J.D. is continuing to hang onto this notion that disapproval for Dubya “is wide, but not deep,” and if you can figure out the difference between the two in this context, then let me know, OK, because I can’t.

This is J.D.’s supposed evidence for this conclusion:

Though prima facie, the evidence comes from a poll conducted by CNN after the president delivered his State of the Union message last week, the one where he restated that he will send 20,000 more soldiers to Iraq.

The lead from the story: “More than three-quarters of Americans who watched President Bush State of the Union address had a positive reaction to it, although the reaction was muted from that in past years.”

The story reports 41 percent of those polled “said they had a "very positive' reaction to it. Another 37 percent said their response was "somewhat positive.' ”

Those polled included 32 percent Republicans, 31 percent Democrats and 36 percent Independents.

Putting aside the stupendously obvious observation that the poll results dealt with the State of the Union speech and not Bush’s nightmarish presidency as a whole, I would like to add the following reality-based perspective from my blogging “betters” as opposed to J.D. contextual delusions (starting with this from Eric Boehlert written last September, including these excerpts)…

Of course, we've seen this gentle treatment before. At the time of Bush's second inauguration the polite Beltway press corps was careful not to dwell on the fact that Bush stood as the least popular modern day president ever to be sworn into office. That's when the first, unmistakable signs of buyer's remorse were plain for everyone to see. But the press played dumb and turned away.

Rather than dwelling on Bush's downward spiral through 2005 and into 2006, the press seemed more anxious in tracking his possible comeback. Last January Time's Mike Allen got a quick jump on the Bush-is-back competition, announcing that the president had "found his voice" and that relieved White House aides "were smiling again" after a turbulent 2005. Of course, in the weeks following Allen's insight, Bush proceeded to plummet to new career lows in the polls.

In mid-June news came that terrorist chief Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had been killed, Karl Rove had escaped criminal prosecution in connection with the CIA leak investigation, and Bush had sprinted over to Baghdad for a five-hour stop over. (Or, a "dramatic lightning visit," as UPI described it.) The spin surrounding Bush's resurgence grew so loud it was difficult to tell who was more energized, the White House or the reporters who cover it. ABC News went so far as to report, "This may have been the president's best week ever." [Emphasis added.]

In truth, the much-hyped June bounce was all but non-existent. From mid-June -- the time of Bush's "best week ever" -- to early July, the Fox News poll had Bush's job approval rating going from 40 down to 36, NBC/Wall Street Journal had it going from 40 down to 39, Hotline from 41 down to 38, CNN from 37 to 40, USA Today from 37 to 40, Time from 35 to 35, and Pew from 36 to 36.

And here’s some historical perspective on Dubya’s approval rating…

• According to Gallup, on the eve of President John F. Kennedy's 1963 assassination, he was suffering the worst job-approval ratings of his presidency -- 58 percent.

• In 1968, when the war in Vietnam was claiming hundreds of U.S. casualties each week, President Lyndon Johnson was considered so unpopular that he didn't even run for re-election. Johnson's average Gallup approval rating for that year was 43 percent.

• When Reagan's second term was rocked by the Iran-Contra scandal, his ratings plummeted, all the way down to 43 percent.

• This year (2006), according to the Gallup numbers, Bush has averaged an approval rating of 37 percent.

More historical context? Sure (such as this from Sean Wilentz)…

Historians do tend, as a group, to be far more liberal than the citizenry as a whole -- a fact the president's admirers have seized on to dismiss the poll results as transparently biased. One pro-Bush historian said the survey revealed more about "the current crop of history professors" than about Bush or about Bush's eventual standing. But if historians were simply motivated by a strong collective liberal bias, they might be expected to call Bush the worst president since his father, or Ronald Reagan, or Nixon. Instead, more than half of those polled -- and nearly three-fourths of those who gave Bush a negative rating -- reached back before Nixon to find a president they considered as miserable as Bush. The presidents most commonly linked with Bush included Hoover, Andrew Johnson and Buchanan. Twelve percent of the historians polled -- nearly as many as those who rated Bush a success -- flatly called Bush the worst president in American history. And these figures were gathered before the debacles over Hurricane Katrina, Bush's role in the Valerie Plame leak affair and the deterioration of the situation in Iraq. Were the historians polled today, that figure would certainly be higher.

Even worse for the president, the general public, having once given Bush the highest approval ratings ever recorded, now appears to be coming around to the dismal view held by most historians. To be sure, the president retains a considerable base of supporters who believe in and adore him, and who reject all criticism with a mixture of disbelief and fierce contempt -- about one-third of the electorate. (When the columnist Richard Reeves publicized the historians' poll last year and suggested it might have merit, he drew thousands of abusive replies that called him an idiot and that praised Bush as, in one writer's words, "a Christian who actually acts on his deeply held beliefs.") Yet the ranks of the true believers have thinned dramatically. A majority of voters in forty-three states now disapprove of Bush's handling of his job. Since the commencement of reliable polling in the 1940s, only one twice-elected president has seen his ratings fall as low as Bush's in his second term: Richard Nixon, during the months preceding his resignation in 1974. No two-term president since polling began has fallen from such a height of popularity as Bush's (in the neighborhood of ninety percent, during the patriotic upswell following the 2001 attacks) to such a low (now in the midthirties). No president, including Harry Truman (whose ratings sometimes dipped below Nixonian levels), has experienced such a virtually unrelieved decline as Bush has since his high point. Apart from sharp but temporary upticks that followed the commencement of the Iraq war and the capture of Saddam Hussein, and a recovery during the weeks just before and after his re-election, the Bush trend has been a profile in fairly steady disillusionment.

Of course, if J.D. had really intended to portray Bush’s poor ratings accurately, he would have mentioned some of what I mentioned here today in his own column (and to be fair, he does quote some people who attended the protests this weekend and provided quotes for his column).

But he didn’t, and I suppose this is to be expected. His skills, apparently, are wide.

But not deep.