The Nation Gets Crankier
by mcjoan
Mon May 12, 2008 at 11:50:39 AM PDT
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.
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