...Yesterday it was Arnold, now it's a new
AP Poll showing Bush's numbers cratering. Oh, how the mighty have fallen...
President Bush's standing with the public is slumping just three months into his final term, but Americans have an even lower regard for the job being done by Congress.
Bush's job approval is at 44 percent, with 54 percent disapproving. Only 37 percent have a favorable opinion of the work being done by the Republican-controlled Congress, according to an AP-Ipsos poll.
Bush's job approval was at 49 percent in January, while Congress was at 41 percent.
"This is a pretty sour spring," said Karlyn Bowman, a public opinion analyst at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. "People are not very impressed by what Bush is doing or by what Congress is doing Democrats or Republicans"...
Some of the most telling quotes come from Republican strategists in the article. If these are your friends, who needs enemies?
...Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio said Bush faces an uphill battle with his plan to allow younger workers to invest some of their Social Security taxes in personal investment accounts.
"With the Social Security plan itself, they're fundamentally trying to sell a plan that isn't popular," Fabrizio said. "They're flying into the wind."
Young adults are supposed to benefit the most from Bush's Social Security proposal, but a majority of that group, 54 percent, opposes the president on that issue.
Ed Rollins, a Republican who was a top political adviser to President Reagan, said if Bush continues to push relentlessly for his Social Security plan he's taking a chance.
"If he wants to make Social Security his legacy," Rollins said, he faces the risk that "there will be no legacy."
The White House comments on these new numbers by saying this...
...The president's poll standing has been in the mid-40s to low-50s for the past two years, said Matthew Dowd, who was a strategist and pollster for Bush in the 2004 presidential campaign.
"The president being at the lower end of his normal range has more to do with the price of gasoline and thus, economic confidence, than anything else," Dowd said...
NOTE: (The AP-Ipsos poll of 1,001 adults was taken April 4-6 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points)