President Bush’s job approval rating has fallen to just 31 percent, according to the new NEWSWEEK Poll. Bill Clinton’s lowest rating during his presidency was 36 percent; Bush’s father’s was 29 percent, and Ronald Reagan’s was 35 percent. Jimmy Carter’s and Richard Nixon’s lows were 28 and 23 percent, respectively. (Just 24 approve of outgoing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s job performance, and 31 percent approve of Vice President Dick Cheney’s.)
Worst of all, most Americans are writing off the rest of Bush’s presidency; two thirds (66 percent) believe he will be unable to get much done, up from 56 percent in a mid-October poll; only 32 percent believe he can be effective. That’s unfortunate since 63 percent of Americans say they’re dissatisfied with the way things are going in the country; just 29 percent are satisfied, reports the poll of 1,006 adults conducted Thursday and Friday nights.
Whether that 66 percent believes it's a good thing that he won't be able to get much done is a question Newsweek doesn't seem to have asked.
Inevitably, Newsweek reassures us that Americans don't really like Democrats either:
But the new poll carries sobering news for Democrats, too, still on their postvictory high. Just about everyone believes the Republicans lost the 2006 midterms more than the Democrats won it. Presented with a list of factors that may have contributed to the Democrats’ success, 85 percent of Americans said the “major reason” was disapproval of the administration’s handling of the war in Iraq, 71 percent said disapproval of Bush’s overall job performance, 67 percent cited dissatisfaction with how Republicans have handled government spending and the deficit, 63 percent said disapproval of the overall performance of Republicans in Congress, 61 percent said Democrats’ ideas and proposals for changing course in Iraq. Tellingly, just 27 percent said a major reason the Democrats won was because they had better candidates.
After all, we can't print anything that indicates people actually WANTED Democrats to win, right? The fact that 61% said they voted Democratic because of their ideas and proposals for changing the course in Iraq is meaningless, I guess. No, it's not about the Democrats at all. We have to stick with the meme that the Democrats' win was some great victory for conservatism.
Contrary to what the pundits in the mainstream media would like you to believe, the Democrats' plan doesn't involve mandatory abortions for all pregnant women, or requiring all married couples to divorce and immediately marry people of the same sex.
So-called "conservative" Jon Tester is an organic farmer who stands for tougher campaign finance laws, reduction in unintended pregnancies through expanded access to contraception, allowing women to make their own decisions about their own bodies, development of clean, renewable energy sources, investment in public education, and oversight of insurance companies to help provide affordable health insurance. But since he supports gun ownership rights, the conservatives want to make him their own.
Jim Webb, who was Ronald Reagan's Secretary of the Navy, has a well-thought-out strategy for ending our involvement in Iraq. He favors tax and trade policies to help reduce the squeeze on the middle class. He favors actually FUNDING the No Child Left Behind initiative. He favors legislation that puts access to health care above insurance company profits. He favors government investment in infrastructure. These hardly represent the positions of the Republican party.
Americans dealt a sound bitchslapping to the Republican Party last Tuesday -- a bigger bitchslapping than (surprise surprise) the final result indicated:
RAY SUAREZ: Quick question on exit polling. It's gotten a lot of attention in recent cycles and been heavily criticized. Was it roughly a good portrait of the electorate this time?
ANDREW KOHUT: It was handled very well. There were some Democratic biases in the early waves of that exit poll. It was showing a bigger Democratic margin than actually turned out to be the case.
I think the way they controlled the dissemination of this, locking these people who are looking at it up until 5:00, minimized the impact of that overstatement of the Democrats. They did a much better job than they did in '04 in that respect. Looking at the data, it suggests they had still had some problems in overstating Democrats.
I'll leave it to you to determine what the implications are of once again, having an election where there is a sizable discrepancy between the exit polls and the final result after exit polls were an accurate indicator in the pre-DRE voting machine days.
But last week's election was a resounding repudiation of greed and war profiteering and false piety and blind, ugly nationalism masquerading as patriotism.
Instead, we'll get these highly radical, leftist initiatives:
Day One: Put new rules in place to "break the link between lobbyists and legislation."
Day Two: Enact all the recommendations made by the commission that investigated the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Time remaining until 100 hours: Raise the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour, maybe in one step. Cut the interest rate on student loans in half. Allow the government to negotiate directly with the pharmaceutical companies for lower drug prices for Medicare patients.
Broaden the types of stem cell research allowed with federal funds _ "I hope with a veto-proof majority," she added in an Associated Press interview Thursday.
All the days after that: "Pay as you go," meaning no increasing the deficit, whether the issue is middle class tax relief, health care or some other priority.
What the remaining apologists for the current Republican party don't understand is that politics is no longer about right and left; about labels that no longer apply. Politics is about who we are as Americans and what we stand for; whether we stand for torture and endless war and centralized dictatorship and ever-increasing upward distribution of wealth, or if we stand for that "shining city on a hill" that the conservatives' icon Ronald Reagan talked about; a beacon of hope and freedom for people all over the world. We liberals haven't forgotten what this country is supposed to stand for. We haven't become so blinded by hate and fear in the aftermath of 9/11 that we are willing to destroy our village in order to save it. And enough voters were able to step outside their reptilian brain last Tuesday to realize that they aren't either.
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