Tucked away deep under the main headline in the latest Fox Poll is this interesting little tidbit.

A Fox Poll has put Bush's approval rating at 27% for the first time.

Sorry to be a one-note Willie, but as my doppelganger Professor Pollkatz has been saying for five years now, Bush's approval goes down and up as the price of gasoline goes up and down.

The reason I mention this once again is that an awful lot of bloggers and commenters have a smug certainty that Bush is down for the count; he'll be President 28% forever, and he'll hold McCain down with him.  I don't think so.

The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.  Here's the pudding:

pollkatz.com
(find "Bush Approval and Gasoline Prices," lower right of your screen)

The nation's bad mood worsens:

Public disgruntlement neared a record high and President Bush slipped to his career low in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll.

Eighty-two percent of Americans now say the country's seriously off on the wrong track, up 10 points in the last year to a point from its record high in polls since 1973. And 31 percent approve of Bush's job performance overall, while 66 percent disapprove.

The country's mood -- and the president's ratings -- are suffering from the double whammy of an unpopular war and a faltering economy. Consistently for the last year, nearly two-thirds of Americans have said the war in Iraq was not worth fighting. And consumer confidence is near its lowest in weekly ABC News polls since late 1985.

Bush's approval rating has been extraordinarily stable -- before today's 31 percent it had been 32 percent or 33 percent in nine ABC/Post polls from July through last month. In presidential approval polls by Gallup since 1934, just three presidents have gone lower: Jimmy Carter, who bottomed out at 28 percent approval in July 1979; Richard Nixon, 24 percent in July and August 1974; and Harry Truman, 22 percent in February 1952.

Bush now has gone 40 months without majority approval, beating Truman's record (also during economic discontent and an unpopular war) of 38 months from 1949-52.

The "extraordinary" stability in Bush's approval rating is only matched the how extraordinarily bad he is at this job. He still, however, has 69% approval from fellow Republicans. The third of Americans who consider themselves independent, however, give him just a 24% approval in this poll.

So the question for McCain is whether he's going to play Maverick for those independents who hate Bush, or is he going to continue to work on consolidating his base, those 69% of Republicans who have left planet reality. It's a conundrum that even his surrogates haven't quite figured out. Via Think Progress, we've got dueling surrogates Romney and Blunt on whether McCain would give us Bush's third term on the economy.

On CNN’s Late Edition today, former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA) claimed that the argument that John McCain would, in effect, be a third Bush term "isn’t going to stick":

BLITZER: [Obama] says he welcomes a debate with John McCain on the issue of the economy, taxes, spending policy because John McCain would simply be more George W. Bush. ... Does John McCain want to continue what Obama called the failed policies of the Bush administration?

ROMNEY: Well I think you’re going to hear that time and again, Wolf, throughout the campaign season. And I just don’t think it’s going to stick.

But earlier on the same program, a leading McCain surrogate — Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MO) — conceded that McCain is indeed promising a third Bush term on the economy:

BLITZER: So it would be in effect a third Bush term when it came to pro-growth tax policies?

BLUNT: It would be. I think it would be. And I think that’s a good thing.

Nothing brings the mainstream media and its pundits more joy than pointing out the failings of others — particularly the approval ratings of the President and the Congress.

But other than a few websites, with a much smaller impact, they have no watchdog. So instead of introspection, they just continue harm America.

The Republican party has an anvil around it's neck and it's named George W. Bush.  

February 20, 2008

Concerns over Economy Push
George W. Bush's Overall Job Approval to New Low

George W. Bush's overall job approval rating has dropped to a new low in American Research Group polling as 78% of Americans say that the national economy is getting worse according to the latest survey from the American Research Group.

Bill in Portland Maine predicted this, and I'll agree, I bet it does tingle.  So much for getting back into the forties by election day.  Although, anything is possible.

Bush crawls to new low of 19% approval...14% on the economy.

Almost daily, for the last few years, I've visited Rasmussen Reports, particularly the page giving the daily poll ratings of Bush's Approval.  You can see it yourself here.

Over the last year, I've come to expect Dubya's disapproval ratings to hover between 56% and 63% - which has always struck me as a serious underestimate of his unpopularity.  What baffles me is the 35% to 42% of polled persons who allegedly identify themselves as approving of his performance.

Graphing it out over the last year (with my own average for December 2007) gives us this picture:

This diary is a response to reader's requests, including approval ratings from Bush’s first term, cartograms, and showing urban areas.  

First, the state approval map and lower 48 county cartogram for Fall 2007.  A cartogram is a map where the size of each geographic unit, in this case each county, is based on something other than land area, in this case population.  It’s especially useful in politics because land doesn't vote, people do.  For a great introduction to cartograms, see BentLiberal’s diary here.  

Click to enlarge.

On the left, sagebrush has a bigger visual impact than New York City; on the right, urban areas get their fair share.

More maps back to 2001 below the fold.

I'm not suggesting that if running all three branches the Dem's would wreak the horrible damage that recent Republicans have. But Bill Clinton's media consolodation give-away and Marc Rich pardon were only two of many sops thrown to the wealthy elites who benefit the most from policies engineered to transfer wealth and power from the rest of the planet to their cozy Wall Street-Washington clique.

No, they wouldn't do worse, but IMHO, they wouldn't do much better.

The Democratic congressional leadership whines about their inability to stop the Iraq war as if their inability to override the president's veto prevented them from doing so. Tragically or cynically, they seem to be the only ones who remain unaware of their Constitutionally given ability to refuse to bring war funding legislation to the floor.

Today Karl Rove announced his resignation from the White House at the end of August.

Karl Rove may be retiring from the White House, but he’s still going strong in the pro-war and election cycle ring.

I read dreaminonempty's diary (Bush Approval Map: No Safe Districts for GOP II) a few weeks back, hooked in by the map.  It’s a striking graphic representation of a phenomenon that results in a common question: what’s with Utah, anyway?  

I don’t think it’s enough to simply say that Utah is a conservative state; in other conservative states, approval hasn’t hung on like this.  One’s first inclination might be to ascribe Utah’s politics to the prevalence of the Mormon faith, but the real question is how does that faith create or foster the conditions necessary for the continued popularity in Utah of President Bush and his policies?  

Cross-posted at www.thinkyouth.net and www.mydd.com

For those of you who haven’t heard already, the poll numbers for the 110th Congress have hit new lows. With an approval rating in the 24-27 % range, and disapproval ratings in the 60-71 % range, America appears to be unhappier with the Congress than they are with the President (approval 26-31%, disapproval 60-66%). My question is, why is this happening?

Over the past few weeks, Republicans and right wing organizations have been starting to hammer this Congress as a "Do Nothing" Congress.  Well, they are not telling the whole side of the story.  Democrats have passed all six of their six for '06 promises(these promises only applied to the House), but all but one(minimum wage) were either blocked by the 49 Republicans in the Senate or vetoed by Bush.  I find it very interesting that these same groups were silent during 1995 when Republicans had a hard time passing anything over Clinton's veto or in 2005 and 2006 when Republicans couldn't get anything done even with firm control of all three branches of government.  

Yesterday, Bu$h set a new record for polling at just 26% approval in a Newsweek poll.  That was the lowest poll ever and was seen by a few pollsters as an outlier, but now it seems maybe it wasn't really that much lower than the norm right now afterall.

Follw me (and Bu$h's approval ratings) down

TPM Cafe:

New Pew poll out today: Approval of Congress has slipped from 39% in January to 34% today.

New Fox News poll, also out today: Approval of Congress has slipped from 32% in January to 29 percent.

One very interesting footnote: In the Fox poll, less Democrats than Republicans approve of the Dem-Controlled Congress, 28%-33%. Could that be because of Congress' failure thus far to stall the Iraq war?

I'm surprised no one else has posted this yet.

I'm not a WSJ subscriber, but here's the report:

Of the 1,001 American adults polled online April 20-23, only 28% had a positive view of Mr. Bush's job performance, down from 32% in February and from a high of 88% in the aftermath of the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The current rating is his weakest showing since his inauguration.

With the situation in Iraq finally turning the corner and the insurgency in its last throes, coupled with the Bush administration having perfectly reasonable proposals for how to deal with the numerous scandals it has found itself amid, the American people have apparently offered President Bush the benefit of the doubt; and, as David Broder predicted, Bush's approval has rebounded back up to a healthy 52%.

When reached for comment, all anybody with a calendar nearby could say is "April Fool's!"

On the evening of Sepember 28, 2006 the national, collective opinion of the American people about their President reached it's zenith for the year.  It was the run up to the election, gas prices were falling, the Bush/Rove PR machine had been running in overdrive for months to improve Bush's image.  By most measures his "approval rating" was almost 41% that evening and still rising.  It looked like it would continue to rise, perhaps breaking 50% in some polls before the election.

The following morning the Mark Foley story started breaking in earnest and Bush's PR machine when over to the defensive.  It has remained there ever since and still has not managed to stop the downward slide that started on the morning of September 29th, 2006.

Follow me down...