Bush’s approval rating is finally beginning to slide into Herbert Hoover territory. He has a long history of doing what he shouldn’t have and not doing what he should have; and voters, whose political consciousness always suffers from attention deficit, are just now sobering up to the disastrous binge Bush has been on since virtually his first day in office.
What is odd about voters’ revised opinion of Bush is that it largely springs from the two things he has had the least control over - a natural disaster and climbing gas prices - while those things he indeed has had control over - a needless war and reckless fiscal policies - remain sources of only mild discontent.
As evidence of this disconnect I offer a recent Associated Press-Ipsos poll, which states that “less than half approve of Bush’s handling of Katrina. Less than a third give him good marks on gas prices.” Now God only knows how the other half could actually approve of Bush’s handling of the Katrina crisis, but the fact remains that the fiasco’s genesis - the storm itself - lay outside any presidential authority to avert. As for gas prices, a little world-market thing called supply and demand dictates their direction and there ain’t much any president can do about it.
Yet it’s the uncontrollables - a storm and oil supplies - that exercise the electorate and bring a sudden but long-overdue shift in its broader opinion. There was this statistical conclusion by the AP-Ipsos poll, causing me flabbergasted wonder: “[Bush is] no longer considered a strong, decisive leader by many voters, a reversal from the 2004 presidential campaign when the wartime incumbent successfully cast himself in those terms” (emphasis added).
Putting aside the electorate’s susceptibility to Rovian demagoguery, one marvels that only now do voters question Bush as a “strong, decisive leader.” Like Voltaire’s observation that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire, blundering into a colossally stupid war was neither strength, nor decisiveness, nor leadership. If you hand a grenade to a three-year-old and he lobs it at your curmudgeonly neighbor, you wouldn’t think to compliment the lad for, say, his decisiveness. You would, of course, be a trifle embarrassed at having given him the grenade to begin with, but you’d also conclude his action merely was that of an immature mind incapable of comprehending consequences and the value of human life.
The other leg of Bush’s “strong leadership” has been his systematic reversal of fiscal responsibility and the advancement of a plutocratic, social nightmare. Yet, to pay for the post-Katrina cleanup, only “29 percent wanted to delay or cancel Republican tax cuts.” Now, I put it to you: Since maybe one percent of the nation benefits from Republican tax cuts, wouldn’t 99 percent of a sane electorate want to cancel the idiotic things, whether there was a coastal region to fix or not?
The public is slowly coming around to seeing Bush’s deficit crisis in play, but it took an unrelated natural disaster to spur even minority doubts. That’s not much of a testament to democracy.
The upside is that the public is coming around at all. And the AP-Ipsos poll revealed the potential depth of future electoral disgruntlement: “nearly all Democrats and two-thirds of independents [have] soured on [Bush’s] presidency”; “GOP strategists worry about a decline in [their base’s] enthusiasm as next year’s midterm elections draw near”; and “by an 8-point margin, voters are more likely to call themselves Democrats than Republicans,” when no such spread existed just a year ago.
The downside? The AP put it this way: “Bush’s best hope may be that Democrats miscalculate as they struggle to find a unified voice post-Katrina.” Oh, how true. Republicans have more than hope; they can almost always count on Democrats miscalculating and struggling and failing to find a unified voice.
Effective politics is about developing a disciplined organization. Good politics is about developing a message and educating voters. Smart politics is about knowing how to lead with both. And let’s face it. Democrats are developmentally disabled. A downside, indeed.