(Pssst, Democrats! Uh, like, carpe diem, dudes!)
“WASHINGTON – Americans’ approval of President Bush’s handling of Iraq is at its lowest level yet” — 38 percent — “according to an AP-Ipsos poll that also found fewer than half now think he’s honest,” reports AP/Yahoo, as well as CNN and MSNBC.
Here’s something I found fascinating in the poll number shift: “Approval of Bush’s handling of Iraq, which had been hovering in the low- to mid-40s most of the year, dipped to 38 percent”:
Midwesterners and young women and men with a high school education or less were most likely to abandon Bush on his handling of Iraq in the last six months.
Bush is losing the heartland. Bush is losing Red State support. And, why not. These people — even if we disagree with their politics — have big hearts. Even they, in time, have come to see the senselessnesss of the Iraq war.
The same — remarkable — demographic shift is seen in the poll on Bush’s honesty, on perception of Bush’s confidence as arrogance, and in the direction of the country. BELOW:
Bush’s overall job approval was at 42 percent, with 55 percent disapproving. That’s about where Bush’s approval has been all summer but slightly lower than at the beginning of the year.
The portion of people who consider Bush honest has dropped slightly from January, when 53 percent described him that way while 45 percent did not. Now, people are just about evenly split on that issue — with 48 percent saying he’s honest and 50 percent saying he’s not.
The drop in the number of people who see Bush as honest was strongest among middle-aged Americans as well as suburban women, a key voting group in the 2004 election. A further erosion of trust could make it tougher for Bush to win support for his policies in Congress and internationally.
“The reason that trust is so important has to do with the long-standing belief that you could trust him, even if you don’t always agree with him and don’t understand what he’s doing,” said Bruce Buchanan, a political scientist at the University of Texas. “The honesty dip is partly caused by a loss of faith in his credibility on Iraq.” … […]
But the portion of people who view his confidence as arrogance has increased from 49 percent in January to 56 percent now.
“This country is a monarchy,” said Charles Nuutinen, a 62-year-old independent from Greenville, Wis. “He’s turning this country into Saudi Arabia. He does what he wants. He doesn’t care what the people want.”
Six in 10 said they think the country is headed down the wrong track, despite some encouraging economic news in recent weeks.
“Iraq is just a great weight holding down perceptions of an economy that is quite robust,” said Karlyn Bowman, a public opinion analyst at the American Enterprise Institute. “Whenever you have troops in harm’s way, people are anxious about things in general.”
The poll of 1,000 adults was conducted Aug. 1-3 by Ipsos, an international polling firm. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Too bad they didn’t come to their senses a year ago. I was just going to diary this. So glad you beat me to it as I really need to get my butt in gear. TGIF!
I usually don’t get too much into poll stories since they’re so wobbly, but these are truly remarkable results.
ALSO: I asked my friend JPol, who posts here, to examine the polling and the analysis. He is something of an expert on polling data, and can interpret further for us.
Let’s hope this holds or gets worse before the 2006 mid-term elections. And tie every freakin’ republican running to Bush. Like Hackett did to Schmidt.
Howie Martin sends along this example of how not to do it:
So much for the big tent, let’s just throw some progressives overboard.
What’s amazing to me is that it is still this high, it should be zero given the shit he’s gotten away with. (or, he’s gotten away with up until now.
In any other era, he likely would not have been selected in the first place, or at least would not have been re-elected, and probably would have been impeached.
I just read the poll itself. Click on “Topline Results” and “Presidential Ratings Charts.”
Couple of things struck me – Bush’s approval is much higher among “registered voters” than among “all adults.” Looks like we have some voter registration work to do – not too soon to start.
And Bush’s approval peaked last Nov. (sigh)
Janet, that’s what I thought at first, too, but then I noticed that the “registered voter” section is just earlier polls. Apparently they only polled registered voters around election time, then switched to all adults.
Nonetheless, we sure do have a lot of registration word to do.
I saw somewhere that white males have the highest voting rate at 70%. If all other demographics voted at the same rate as white males, Dems would overwhelmingly win most races.
I’m cautiously optimistic that these sinking poll numbers for Bush might be reflective of a more dramatic and fundamental failure of the entire right wing propaganda machine’s strategy. Here’s what I mean.
I’ve long postulated 2 things. One is that Bush gets an enormous amount of mileage out of what I call the Village Idiot Syndrome. Basically, because he’s so mentally and cognitively challenged, but at the same time (inexplicably) seen as an affable sort, people are reluctant to make fun of him or take advantage of him. Simply put, socially it’s just not cool to beat up on the “village idiot”. And Bush’s handlers know this too, and have incorporated this dynamic into their strategy for how they present him to the public, in a sense maximizing his appeal by taking advantage of every trick they can.
Secondly, I’ve long held that the main reason for the wingnut propaganda machine’s alarming success in weaponizing the ignorance of the public is due to the fact that their “messaging” operates on an emotional plane, rather than on one base on reason and rational thought. Whether the content of their messages is factually accurate or not is pretty much irrelevant. Their goal is to affect one’s emotional makeup in ways that cause us to find certain candidates and ideas as likeable and trustable, and to make us afraid of and view as untrustworthy other candidates and ideas. They know that people always tend to believe what they want to believe, so a cenral objective of their manipulative program is to guide people into wanting to believe in the things they want them to believe in. (This looks like a hopelessly convoluted sentence, but it does make sense.
As long as the emotional manipulation works on the public, the wingnuts can continue to be successful. But, as soon as the emotional trickery loses it’s effectiveness, their grip on the public psyche begins to tank because they can’t sell their ideas on the basis of facts because the facts are always against their ideas.
With Bush’s numbers on this steep and steady decline, I think this is a harbinger of eventual decay of the entire rightwing message machine. First of all, the “village idiot” thing only works in favor of that idiot if he continues to be seen as benign, (think Victor Hugo’s “Quasimodo”). Once a village idiot is perceived as being devious, or as an outright liar, all the social restraints that made the public reluctant to challenge him are rendered “inoperative”, (think of the peasants chasing Frankenstein with torches and pitchforks).
And if and when this emotionally sympathetic construct is dissolved, pretty much all else connected with this person, all the ideas and policies advanced in his name, become suspect, (Think “fruit of the poisoned tree”). Increasingly, more and more people will simply be unwilling to believe anything advocated in this guys name. And they won’t be willing to believe because they’ll feel duped and betrayed, 2 emotions no one welcomes into their life.
So, this is what I see but, as yet, it still remains in the realm of hope. If we had some smart, forthright and principled Dems who could step up and constructively point out the fallacies and deceptions at the heart of the Bush regime’s policies and rhetoric, then we could possibly advance the rate of decline of the wingnut machine. Hope springs eternal.
I wish I was smart enough and clever enough to find a way to use fewer words to say all this.
once the perceptions start to change. These things tend to snowball, and the more the perception mismatches with the reality, the stronger the anger when it’s no longer possible to buy into the delusion. Once that willingness to believe goes away, all of a sudden nothing that comes from the manipulators is taken on faith anymore. In turn, once that happens, the emotional bullshit no longer operates and the lies and pimping are seen as the nakedly contemptible propaganda that they are. Once the dam breaks, the change can be dizzying.
The big problem is, nobody wants to be the one to pull away the curtain. For pols, this is not entirely irrational — the bearer of unpleasant truths is not generally the one who reaps the benefit. Once again we run into the millstone that our crappy American two-party system keeps strangling us with. A press that generally sees itself as part of the ruling class and a political establishment that, left or right, wants to keep quietly doing what it wants without interference from the voters leave us with nobody to start the ball rolling.
Maybe that’s a good thing in the long view because it means the people have to take the lead. But it’s a painfully slow and uncertain thing. Hackett showed us that speaking the truth can work remarkably well even in an extremely hostile district in Ohio. It could work even better on a bigger podium from a better-known face. And it would be so damn easy. Until we can make radical changes to our moribund political system, our best hope remains a few good people willing to put their political careers on the line for their country.
about the “snowball effect” regarding the loss of trust derailing the Bush juggernaut. I also agree that, as you say, with a MSM run by self-important pseudo-aristocrats intoxicated with their own importance, with politicians by and large more concerned with playing their “clubby”, congressional game with each other, and with the DLC waging it’s own war of aggression against it’s own party’s membership in their quest for dominance, we, the people on the left-of-center end of the see-saw are not going to get much assistance from any of the institutions of power.
As things are now I suspect that any electoral increases we manage to achieve in 2006 will more likely be the result of Repub self-destruction than of any improvements Democrats might have made in their ability to communicate effectively and to stand up unequivocally for principles that represent the very foundations of Democratic principle. I’d love to be more optimistic about Dem performance, but, sadly, I see no evidence yet to warrant such optimism.
In one way, it seems to me that the entire political process is so contaminated with so many bad habits and devious machinations that virtually anyone who rises to prominence is automatically more suspect than those who remain more obscure. It’s almost as though we might be better served by reluctant candidates, candidates who we, the people, have to convince to run. Someone wiser than me once said; “The fact that someone wants to be a judge should automatically disqualify them from becoming one”. IMHO, that same rubric might well apply to politicians as well.
is that once the craven social climbers in the media and the government perceive the shifting of the wind, they’ll stampede to get on the sweet side of it first. Not because of their fine “principles” but because it’s where the money and power went. Kind of like, if you need to get a building destroyed, it might be good to bring in termites — their aims are not the same as yours, but their effects are temporarily beneficial.
I’ve thought for a long time that our political process couldn’t be better constructed if if aim was to elevate the very worst people America could produce. The mystery is not how scum like Bush, Cheney, and Delay come to power, but how the few folks with some integrity like Feingold, Kucinich, and Boxer do.
It seems obvious to me that we’d be much better off if we chose candidates at random, let them present their case on public broadcasting, and let the best person win. We might not get any Lincolns or Washingtons out of it, but we’d be unlikely to get any more Bushes, Nixons, Hardings, or Reagans either.
I’ve also thought for some time that the only changes that can pull the country out of its current cesspool are those as fundamental as the above suggestion. Perhaps Bush is creating the chaos, despair, and destruction that will make such radical notions finally discussable.
so:
midwesterners = the heartland
fair enough
young women and men with a high school education or less = Red State support
that’s being a bit unfair, imo.
maybe that wasn’t your implication, but thats certainly how it looked to me.
Just be careful not to perpetuate the who “democrats are elitists” thing.
according to all the demographics I’ve seen. In policy, of course, the GOP caters exclusively to a tiny, tiny elite. But in political strategy it keeps that elite running everything by empty pandering to the least educated white men in the country. The task is not to avoid being called “elitists”, it is to make thinking and understanding desirable qualities again, and to invite the fools for Bush to rejoin the real elite that cares about them, not just Kennyboy Lay and Dick Cheney.