SW's Energy Gap: "Anyone who has followed American politics over the past four years is familiar with the plots of Bush's approval rating since his election in 2000. There was a slow decay to around 45% until the huge impulse from 9/11 that made him one of the most popular presidents in recent memory. But then, a funny thing happened. From a peak of over 90% approval, his numbers began a slow steady decline. In fact it was amazing. The first derivative of Bush's approval was always negative! The only thing that kept the numbers up were the effects of other, smaller impulses. There was the launching of the Iraq War and the lead-up to it, that provided the upward bump necessary to prevail in the mid-term elections in 2002. There was the mini-bump when US forces captured Saddam.
Those of us who predicted an easy win for John Kerry did so based primarily on an extrapolation of the decay of Bush's popularity into November. This is not an unreasonable assumption. Indeed, it is nearly certain that we will see a continuation of this decay as the results of Bush's policies become more evident.
However, what we didn't take into consideration is that the election itself served as another one of these mini-impulses, like the capture of Saddam which temporarily boosts Bush's approval rating. It turns out that a massive $500,000,000 media campaign designed to generate fear in the electorate of both terrorism and the challenger served as enough of an impulse to bring Mr. Bush's numbers slightly above the 50% level, just long enough to make it past the election.
In the run-up to the election we were constantly told not to read too much into the polls. They represented simply a 'snap shot in time'. Well the election is just the grand-daddy of all polls. It also represents a snap-shot in time. The political skill evident in Bush's re-election was the ability to take a failed candidate and provided a sufficient bounce at precisely the right time, to get him past the election with a marginally positive approval rating. One shouldn't minimize the skill required to do this. But talk of a mandate is absurd. All that this election means is that on 11/2/04 George Bush had the approval of 51% of those who cast ballots. And I would remind everyone that this result was only true on 11/4. Of course that is enough to claim the job for another four years. But given the historical behavior of his approval rating, the intractable messes he's gotten us into and his unwillingness to change, the notion that he 'has the will of the people behind him' or that there are any great sociological implications associated with the election is laughable. Mandate my ass!