[Mb-civic] Bush's falling poll numbers - Thomas Oliphant - Boston Globe

[William Swiggard]

Bush's falling poll numbers

By Thomas Oliphant  |  October 7, 2005

WASHINGTON --SINCE WE ALL know -- from President Bush himself, no less 
-- that he is such a selfless leader that he never even peeks at opinion 
polls, let's take a naughty glimpse at the latest anyway.

This stuff is from Zogby International, and it's current. On the 
fighting in Iraq, Americans who think Bush is doing a good or excellent 
job are just 36 percent of the sample. Those who say fair or poor are 
now above 60 percent -- 63 to be precise.

Those numbers don't come close to explaining why Bush has suddenly 
become vocal again on security issues -- the Rose Garden (twice) and the 
Reagan Building (once) having been the sites of speeches just in the 
last week.

The real reason is to be found in the numbers on what used to be 
considered the president's strongest suit -- the so-called war on 
terror. These are the numbers he used to bludgeon John Kerry last year 
as someone who could not be trusted to ''keep us safe,'' in order to 
scare the devil out of just enough voters to win reelection. From the 
immediate aftermath of 9/11 right through this spring -- and even while 
the rest of his numbers were beginning to crumble under the weight of 
ineptitude and worse -- the terrorism numbers held strong.

No more. They had been eroding for weeks, and the abysmal performance of 
government during the Gulf Coast hurricanes -- exposing a stunning 
absence of ability to cope with catastrophe -- probably accelerated the 
decline. At any rate, the latest Zogby numbers on Bush and the war on 
terror -- in line with all the other data that pollutes the political 
landscape -- are 49 percent good or excellent and 50 percent fair or poor.

The problem the president has faced in the Rose Garden and at the Reagan 
Building here yesterday is that there is very little he can do about 
this mess except talk. He has all the money he wants (even though it is 
money the government doesn't technically have). He has all the power he 
wants. There is nothing more to get except those elusive results. 
Blaming somebody else for his woes isn't much of an option anymore.

The real problem is not so much the opinion polls as the fact that the 
clock is ticking in Iraq toward that awful moment when it becomes clear 
that the country no longer trusts Bush on the subject or no longer 
supports an open-ended military involvement or both.

The president's handlers have gone to great lengths to show him with his 
top military people in recent days, but the photos have not obscured the 
disturbing fact that he and they are not on the same page.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/10/07/bushs_falling_poll_numbers/
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