Monday, November 13, 2006

The incredible shrinking president

By Diane Silver

I know this is a tad old. After all the poll came out on Saturday, but this is the first time I've had a chance to take note of Newsweek's new survey showing that our really and truly not-so-beloved president has an approval rating of 31 percent.
To put that in perspective, Newsweek notes:
Bill Clinton's lowest rating during his presidency was 36 percent; Bush's father's was 29 percent, and Ronald Reagan's was 35 percent. Jimmy Carter's and Richard Nixon's lows were 28 and 23 percent, respectively. (Just 24 approve of outgoing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's job performance, and 31 percent approve of Vice President Dick Cheney's.)

Worst of all, most Americans are writing off the rest of Bush's presidency; two thirds (66 percent) believe he will be unable to get much done, up from 56 percent in a mid-October poll; only 32 percent believe he can be effective. That's unfortunate since 63 percent of Americans say they're dissatisfied with the way things are going in the country; just 29 percent are satisfied, reports the poll of 1,006 adults conducted Thursday and Friday nights.

Actually, a survey hardly matters now that we've got the results of the most important poll of all, the mid-term election.

When I first started calling George W. Bush our "not-so-beloved president," I said that because I personally didn't love his anti-civil liberties, anti-gay, Iraq disaster, incompetent, destroy-FEMA administration. In 2005 when I began writing that, I felt a tad alone in that opinion. Although millions of Americans agreed with me, many millions more didn't. Who knew they'd catch up so fast?

Unfortunately, the tide has turned because this administration has done enormous damage to this country. It's the citizens who are and will continue to pay the price, not Bush.

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