Also In This Issue Related stories are available to subscribers only: Second-Term Rebounds Related Resources On NationalJournal.com Poll Track: Polling On George W. Bush, Job Approval · National Journal: Social Security Roundup · On The Trail: "Bush's Ambition Problem" (11/02/05) · Off To The Races: "Can This Presidency Be Saved?" (11/01/05) · National Journal Cover Story: "A Disillusioned Public" (09/16/05) · Social Studies: "George W. Bush, The Life-Preserver President" (07/22/05) · National Journal Cover Story: "Team Texas" (01/14/05) [an error occurred while processing this directive] Additional Resources On The Web American Presidents: Life Portraits · "The Lewinsky Affair and Popular Support for President Clinton," Polling Report · "Why Does Polling Matter?"

By Carl M. Cannon , National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Jan. 6, 2006

Fifty-six years ago, President Truman's job-approval rating in the Gallup Poll slipped below 40 percent and stayed there. Americans vacillated wildly in their attitudes toward Truman, but the 33rd president himself was consistent in his dim estimation of polling -- a view formed when the nation's pollsters predicted confidently that he would lose the 1948 election to Thomas Dewey by five- to 15-percentage points. Nonetheless, on March 15, 1951, White House reporters vacationing with Truman in Key West, Fla., asked the president about the public's loss of confidence in him, as evidenced by a job-approval rating hovering in the high 20s. "I commented on that in 1948," Truman said dismissively. "I would advise you to go study history."

That suggestion is as valid today as it was in Truman's time, especially as George W. Bush ended the year on the upswing, after months of apocalyptic headlines detailing the erosion in his public standing. But neither Bush's difficult 2005, nor Truman's troubles were figments of the media's imagination. Truman interpreted his re-election as a mandate for a sweeping liberal agenda he named the "Fair Deal." It wasn't to be, and in his second term, the polls gave Harry hell. As the Korean War ground to a stalemate and Truman's popularity faded, Congress blocked his plans for universal health coverage, bottled up civil-rights legislation, and refused to repeal the Taft-Hartley law restricting labor unions -- which Truman had run against while seeking re-election.

Bush, after winning a second term by 3 million votes, spent the better part of the year stumping unsuccessfully for Social Security reform. And he found himself on the losing end of a public-relations battle with Democrats over causes of the Iraq war, and on the defensive over his administration's response to Hurricane Katrina. By midsummer, Bush's job-approval rating fell below 50 percent. In October, it dipped below 40 percent, staying there through November.

Like Truman, Bush can be admired for his grit. But a president ignores public opinion at his own peril. The question facing Bush in 2006 is whether he can recover the high ground or whether, like Truman, he is occupying his natural habitat -- the boggy terrain below 50 percent, where it is hard to accomplish much of anything.

"George W. Bush's presidency is on life support," wrote John Kenneth White, professor of politics at Catholic University, in October. "Nine months into his second term, Bush's political capital was all but spent. If he were a bank, he would have to declare bankruptcy."

That perception may or may not be permanent. And it is not all Bush's fault. But if this view persists, and becomes a consensus, it will be a long three years at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Part of Bush's challenge is the composition of today's electorate -- and Bush's place in it. This country truly is divided nearly in half about him. A second hurdle is Bush's own makeup. Temperamentally, he is, to paraphrase his first-term campaign slogan, a confronter, not a compromiser -- and he and his staff did not seem to know what to do with a good thing after the 2004 election. Moreover, the modern presidency has a structural problem: its built-in lame-duck nature.

"Every president who has been restricted by the 22nd Amendment has had what is referred to as a 'second-term curse,' " said Stephen J. Wayne, a presidency scholar at Georgetown University. "Usually, their problems begin with behaviors that started in the first term but which weren't fully revealed until the second term: The U-2 incident for Eisenhower. Watergate for Nixon. Iran-Contra for Reagan. Monica Lewinsky for Clinton. These missteps make them targets. Before a president becomes a lame duck, he is a sitting duck."

Can't Get There From Here
For Bush, the first-term behavior that brought the second-term headache was his reliance on flawed facts while making the case for invading Iraq. In December, tired of being a punching bag on this issue, Bush launched a public-speaking blitz, giving six major speeches and holding a press conference in a two-week period. Bush's approval rating began creeping back up toward 50 percent, but the fickleness of independent voters means that if you're playing limbo, the bar moves in both directions. Bush's popularity could recede to its November 2005 levels -- or it could go even lower.

A year after his 1972 re-election, Richard Nixon's job-approval rating plummeted to 30 percent -- and kept falling. In Jimmy Carter's third year in office, his rating dipped to 29 percent. In 1946, Truman's number was even lower -- 27 percent -- and though he recovered and won re-election, Truman had the dubious distinction of registering the lowest job-approval ratings that Gallup has ever recorded for a president, 23 percent in 1951 -- a tick below Nixon's rating when he resigned office in disgrace.

Truman is seen in a better light today than he was while in office, and Bush -- like Clinton before him -- often praises the 33rd president. But Clinton didn't ignore polling. He went to great lengths, in fact, to keep his approval ratings above 50 percent. Mostly he succeeded, with the notable exception coming after his health care plan failed -- a mistake Clinton did not repeat, partly by not proposing any more grand initiatives. Without mentioning Clinton by name, Bush has made plain his disdain for that theory of governance. What is the point of holding a great office, he suggests, if not to do great things?

"My job is to confront big challenges and lead," Bush said in his pre-Christmas press conference. "So I'm just going to keep doing my job." It's an attitude that, in his first term, earned Bush grudging respect, even from adversaries. But in 2005, when Bush squandered his self-proclaimed "political capital" on an ill-fated Social Security plan, he revealed the limitations of this damn-the-polls strategy. If a president's popularity falls too low, nobody will follow him -- and none of those sweeping presidential plans will go anywhere.

At such times, it's as though a president can't get there from here. Try something big -- get shot down. Play it safe -- get done nothing of consequence. Some Bush allies insist that democracy in Iraq, not the 2005 poll numbers, will determine Bush's legacy. But it's not that simple. If Bush's unpopularity helps Democrats take back Congress in 2006, the Democrats can launch investigations of the president -- and constrain Bush's authority to prosecute the war.

Five days before Christmas, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., issued a report on Bush's "misconduct" in the run-up to the Iraq war, and he called for congressional censure of Bush and Vice President Cheney. Conyers is not a backbencher: He's in line to be chairman of the Judiciary Committee if Democrats recapture the House.

So, Bush could turn out to be Truman, whose second comeback came after his death, when a new generation of presidential scholars rediscovered his blunt charms -- or he could be Nixon, whose reputation never recovered from Watergate.

Or worse. The least successful American president, by a near-consensus of presidential scholars, was James Buchanan. When it comes to judging Bush, even that name is on the table.

"There are serious people who believe that George W. Bush will prove to ... be worse than Buchanan," presidential biographer Richard Reeves wrote recently. "I have talked with three significant historians in the past few months who would not say it in public, but who are saying privately that Bush will be remembered as the worst of the presidents."

Same Old, Same Old
Increasingly, the public is conveying a sense of buyer's remorse about Bush. And the closer one examines these polls, the grimmer the picture looks.

In an Ipsos Public Affairs poll taken in November, 43 percent of respondents say they "strongly disapprove" of the president; only 18 percent strongly approve. Asked in a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll taken in November about the 2006 midterm elections, four out of 10 voters said they intend to use their vote to signal dissatisfaction with Bush.

These numbers suggest that Bush won't be able to talk his way out of the national doghouse. People are looking for tangible progress in Iraq, along the Gulf Coast, and in politically paralyzed Washington. This isn't a bad thing -- demanding results in an age dominated by hype -- but a poll by the Pew Research Center shows that in today's polarized America, many citizens are looking past all of that. Instead of weighing the president's words or his actions, they are essentially wishing Bush away, and fantasizing about the 2008 presidential election.

"While the presidential election is still more than three years off, Bush's problems are fueling a widespread desire for change," says the Pew report. "By a sizable margin (69 percent to 25 percent), more Americans say that as they look ahead to the next [national] election, they would prefer to see a president who offers different policies from the Bush administration rather than one offering programs similar to the Bush administration's."

Part of this is simply fatigue for all things Bush, a sentiment exacerbated because this man's father was also president -- after serving eight years as vice president. "Presidents do wear on people," Wayne says. "And this president, in particular, has put so much emphasis on public relations and speeches that people tune out. It may not be the 'same old, same old,' but we assume it is."

One question that people in the White House are asking is how it came to this so quickly after Bush's re-election.

The tempting answer is, in a word, Iraq. But public opinion surveys don't quite show that. Asked in a Pew Research Center poll in December 2004 whether the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, 44 percent of respondents answered affirmatively. Asked the same question in December 2005, the number who said "yes" had risen -- but only to 48 percent. Thus, most of those who think Iraq was the wrong course feel that way because they think America should not have gone at all, not because of events since the invasion.

"As plausible as it is to see Iraq as a major driver of the president's slump, it's hard to prove it with the polling data," explains Scott Keeter, director of Pew's survey research. "I'm more inclined to see his troubles as a combination of things. Iraq is certainly a part of it, but also gas prices, Hurricane Katrina, continued anxieties about the economy among many people, scandals that have disproportionately affected Republicans. Many of these problems have been mutually reinforcing."

The 50 Percent Solution
Pundits and political practitioners are necessarily fixated on the ups and downs of the polls, but there are more durable ways of looking at job-approval ratings. Presidential scholars tend to look at how presidents did at the real polls -- the election booths -- and social scientists, even those who are professional pollsters, emphasize a president's average job-approval rating over time.

In March 1991, flush with victory in the Persian Gulf War, Americans gave George H.W. Bush an astonishing 89 percent job-approval rating. This seemed like an artificial number because it was: The elder Bush's average over four years was 61 percent -- and, in his last year in office, it averaged about 40 percent. We have an impression of John F. Kennedy and Dwight Eisenhower as popular presidents. That's because they were: Kennedy's average was 70 percent, and Eisenhower's was 66 percent.

Ike's popularity was reflected in voting, as well. In 1952, Eisenhower defeated Adlai Stevenson with 55.1 percent of the vote. In their 1956 rematch, Eisenhower won 57.6 percent of the popular vote, and 457 of 530 electoral votes. Reagan got nearly 52 percent of the vote in a three-man race in 1980, and he won 59 percent of the vote -- and 525 electoral votes -- four years later.

This is not George W. Bush territory. The current president ran for president twice, earning 48 percent and 51 percent of the vote in his two elections. His job-approval rating, despite a bounce to 90 percent after 9/11, has averaged 52.5 percent for the past two years. If this is Bush's "natural" number, he doesn't have much of a cushion when things go wrong.

Governing From The Right
Two years ago, in an essay called "The 50-Something President," Catholic University's White and pollster John Zogby postulated that Bush's popularity would fluctuate around the 50 percent mark for the foreseeable future, and that the 2004 election would be close. Mindful of Bush's determination to govern forcefully, despite the closeness of his 2000 election, the authors envisioned an activist -- and, by implication, a somewhat polarizing -- president.

"What is clear is that unlike his predecessors who won bitterly contested elections after losing the popular vote, George W. Bush's administration represents an important presidency whose course has altered the plan of history," they stated. "It will not be said that the 43rd resident merely occupied the White House."

These predictions were prescient -- and the 2004 election was indeed close. Eight million more Americans voted for John Kerry than had turned out for Al Gore in 2000. But 11.6 million more voted for Bush in 2004 than had supported him four years earlier, and he won election with 51 percent of the vote.

At a press conference, Bush brought up his "political capital." He declared, "And now I intend to spend it -- on Social Security and tax reform, moving this economy forward, education, fighting and winning the war on terror." Bush's job approval that day stood at 57 percent. But the ground was already shifting beneath him. One reason was the way he had governed in his first term.

Back in 2000, Bush vowed to be a "uniter, not a divider." Rhetorically, he kept his word, eschewing the ad hominem attacks that his opponents routinely used against him. But that's only half the equation. Bush ran as a conservative, and he governed as one. His tax cuts and first-term budgets passed on near party-line votes. His administration sought bipartisan consensus on his education reform legislation, the No Child Left Behind Act, but essentially declined to negotiate seriously with Democrats thereafter. Democrats were split down the middle on Iraq, while Republicans faithfully followed their president.

Bush's approach kept conservatives in his camp, but at the price of antagonizing the half of Americans who didn't vote for him. Bush's dealings with Congress exacerbated Democrats' grievances. He stayed at arm's length from the messy legislative battles on Capitol Hill, leaving the details of governing to a partisan, conservative GOP congressional leadership that passed legislation with narrow majorities while effectively disenfranchising the minority party.

In 2004, with the war in Iraq turning more contentious by the day, Bush waded, albeit reluctantly, into a high-profile "wedge" issue -- gay marriage. His stated opposition helped Bush with evangelical voters, particularly since Kerry's position was so murky, but it hardly signaled a president seeking to heal a nation.

"How divided is the country?" political analyst Bill Schneider asked a week before the 2004 election. "The [Gallup] Poll asked voters whether they felt President Bush is more of a 'uniter' or a 'divider.' The answer: 48 percent call Bush a uniter; 48 percent call him a divider."

That was how Bush stood on the eve of his victory. It was an ominous omen.

Bush Versus Bush
Love him or loathe him, Bush ran for re-election on the strength of a coherent narrative, one he revisited in the last four weeks of 2005. This story line presented Bush as a can-do president, the first CEO chief executive, who in his first months in office passed his promised tax relief plans and helped lead an overhaul of America's public school system. He was also, and most importantly, according to the narrative, a wartime commander-in-chief who responded forcefully to the 9/11 attacks, first by offering a reassuring presence in a time of mourning, next by decapitating the Taliban in Afghanistan, where the violence against the United States was planned, and finally by launching an audacious U.S.-led invasion to depose a long-hated tyrant in Iraq.

"A president's most solemn duty is to protect the American people," Bush asserted on the campaign trail. "And ... I believe if we show any uncertainty or weakness in this decade, this world will drift toward tragedy. This will not happen on my watch."

It was bold talk from a confident-sounding man, and it reassured enough Americans to bring Bush another term. But afterward, without Kerry as a foil, Bush was at the mercy of his own program. Voters were free to judge Bush not against Al Gore or John Kerry, but against the job they thought he should be doing. And all the dissatisfaction came home to roost in the days that Katrina inundated New Orleans, while Bush fiddled around at his ranch and then, literally, flew over the city on Air Force One.

"I think Katrina was the precipitating event" for Bush, says Lewis L. Gould, author of The Modern American Presidency. "His defining persona was [that] he was the guy who said, 'I will take care of you in the face of danger.' Then, when a disaster hit -- for which we had ample warning -- we realize, 'Oh, my God. He can't protect us.' "

In other words, in 2005 Bush was being judged against Bush. That can be a tough standard for a chief executive.

"I've seen this movie before," says Democratic political consultant Garry South, the top strategist for deposed California Gov. Gray Davis. "What is happening to Bush is exactly what happened to Davis. Bush should feel damned lucky you can't recall a president the way you can a governor."

The danger of a politician effectively having to run against himself was underscored in November 2005, again in California. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the man Californians selected to replace Davis, torpedoed his own popularity by stumping for a series of doomed reform measures in a special election that voters didn't want. "The election over those initiatives became Arnold versus Arnold," South said. "And Arnold lost. I wonder if Bush was watching."

Spending His Capital
In 1960, President-elect Kennedy was asked about his mandate. "Mandate schmandate," Kennedy scoffed, mindful that he had just won one of the closest elections in history. "The mandate is that I'm here and you're not."

Forty years later, Bush assumed the presidency after an election even closer than Kennedy's. And when he won again in 2004, 51-48 percent, Bush perceived more significance in that victory than others did, including many who voted for him. This was understandable, but counterproductive.

"I think he misread the election returns," Gould said. "A majority of voters said, 'We prefer you to Kerry, but please don't change anything.' But Bush heard a different voice."

The voice he heard was his own, uttered daily on the 2004 campaign trail, where Bush had promised adoring audiences that he'd make it possible for Americans to set aside part of their Social Security retirement in private accounts.

Kennedy's caveat notwithstanding, presidents who get big things done are those who are willing to try. But Bush had already mobilized this nation for a war it wasn't sure it wanted, and spending the first months of his second term on a huge domestic issue diluted his own agenda. Even a president's megaphone carries only so far, and while Bush was discussing Social Security, he wasn't focusing as much on Iraq.

Disillusioned Democrats, seeking to rationalize their own support for the invasion, settled on a story line that had Bush lying about Iraq's supposed arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. And while Bush was busy stumping on Social Security, the Democrats' contention took hold among a majority of Americans. By October 2005, a majority of poll respondents told Gallup that they believed the president had "deliberately misled" the public about the reasons for invading Iraq. A view once relegated to the left-wing blogosphere and to Hollywood fundraisers gradually went mainstream.

In November and December, the White House launched a furious effort to rebut this belief, and Bush's poll numbers ticked upward. But it may prove to be too little, too late. In his 2003 book, On Deaf Ears: The Limits of the Bully Pulpit, presidential scholar George C. Edwards III argued that it is difficult for a president to move public opinion. As Edwards noted in an interview, Bush couldn't even change Americans' minds on Social Security.

"He thought he had political capital, which he did not," Edwards told NJ. "He thought he could move public opinion, which he cannot.... These were costly mistakes."

As Bush's popularity declined, he also became a liability to his own plans for Social Security. American showed broad support for proposals to tweak the system -- until Bush's name was attached to the same ideas.

And the president's sky-is-falling language on Social Security subtly undermined his authority on Iraq, reminding Americans that Bush had employed similar wording about an impending "crisis" to build support for war while many were counseling patience. In his 2005 State of the Union address, Bush walked the nation through Social Security's structural weaknesses and then came to the punch line: In 2018, the system will be paying out more than it takes in. Unfortunately, this factoid didn't make Americans want to bite the bullet now. Instead, it raised the question of why a commander-in-chief with troops in the field was even talking about this subject.

"We don't use the Lyndon Johnson-era phrase 'credibility gap' anymore," says Purdue University political scientist Bert Rockman. "But that is what's happened to Bush."

Revenge Of The Left
At the beginning of 2005, 56 percent of Californians pronounced themselves ready to re-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger. At the end of the year, only 36 percent were on his side. What happened was that the state's labor unions and Democratic Party leaders, while campaigning to defeat the Schwarzenegger-backed ballot initiatives, spent $100 million criticizing the governor.

"If you ran $100 million worth of ads against Mother Teresa -- or Rosa Parks -- you could mess up their polls numbers, too," quipped California political consultant Dan Schnur, a former campaign aide to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. "And Arnold is not as pure as they are."

Neither is W. But in the six years he's been on the national scene, he's been the target of 20 times as many attack ads as Schwarzenegger has. In 2004, Democrats ranging from Howard Dean and Wesley Clark to Teresa Heinz Kerry and Michael Moore routinely called Bush's patriotism into question -- even as these critics complained (inaccurately) that Bush was questioning their patriotism. Moore compared the USA PATRIOT Act to Mein Kampf. George Soros equated Bush's ascension to the White House with Mussolini's rise to power; Al Gore used the phrase "brown shirts" in a speech disparaging Bush.

This is not the kind of rhetoric that shuts off merely because the voters have spoken, and it continued apace throughout 2005.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada publicly called Bush a "liar" and a "loser." Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, Reid's counterpart in the House, said that Bush was an "incompetent" who has "on his shoulders the deaths of many more troops." Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean routinely calls the administration "corrupt," says that the president deliberately misled the American people about Iraq, and charges that the deaths from Hurricane Katrina were Bush's fault. Dean had previously said he "hates" Republicans, adding, "This is a struggle between good and evil."

A fair amount of this vitriol works its way into the blogosphere, where it is amplified, and into the popular media. On their 2005 tour, the Rolling Stones unveiled the song "Sweet Neocon." "You call yourself a Christian," sang Mick Jagger. "I call you a hypocrite." And so it goes.

Democrats are quick to say that Bill Clinton came in for a lot of this kind of treatment. They have a point, although a better analogy might be the way Republicans spoke about Franklin D. Roosevelt before World War II, or the way anti-war liberals assailed Lyndon Johnson at the height of the Vietnam War. Harry Truman knew that wartime will do that, and he had an aphorism to deal with it: "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen."

Bush doesn't mind being close to the stove, but that's not good enough for a president. He has started things that need finishing, even if his capacity to influence them is constrained. In a December 14 speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center, Bush lauded Truman for ignoring those who, in the wake of World War II, believed the Japanese were not ready for democracy.

"Truman stuck to his guns," Bush said. "He believed, as I do, in freedom's power to transform an adversary into an ally.... And because he stayed true to his convictions, today Japan is one of the world's freest and most prosperous nations, and one of America's closest allies in keeping the peace."

Bush went on to say that spreading freedom to Iraq and the rest of the Middle East requires the same confidence and persistence that Truman exhibited. Perhaps Bush will be proven right. But success or failure is now beyond the sphere of speechifying -- and may be out of Bush's hands altogether. Japan is what it is. North Korea, the nemesis that Truman did not conquer, is a Stalinist state all these decades later, armed with nuclear weapons. And it wasn't until 20 years after Truman left office that Americans began appreciating the acquired taste of someone who leads with his chin, saying what he thinks, confident that the pollsters -- and the people -- will eventually get it right.

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