Last month, George Bush showed that he can reach for newer and greater heights when he broke the Gallup poll record for highest disapproval ever recorded for a president over the last 70 years.
The records keep rolling in…but, this month, Bush is an equal opportunity record-breaker. He has reached a new high and sunk to new lows for May:
The month started out with a new high (my emphasis throughout):
A new poll suggests that George W. Bush is the most unpopular president in modern American history.
A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Thursday indicates that 71 percent of the American public disapprove of how Bush his handling his job as president.
“No president has ever had a higher disapproval rating in any CNN or Gallup poll; in fact, this is the first time that any president’s disapproval rating has cracked the 70 percent mark,” said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.
“Bush’s approval rating, which stands at 28 percent in our new poll, remains better than the all-time lows set by Harry Truman and Richard Nixon (22 percent and 24 percent, respectively) but even those two presidents never got a disapproval rating in the 70s,” Holland added. “The previous all-time record in CNN or Gallup polling was set by Truman, 66 percent disapproval in January 1952.”
Bush shows that he has also mastered the lows on Sunday when Rassmussen Reports gave their weekly and monthly approval/disapproval summaries:
For the week ending May 9, just 32% of Americans approved of the way the George W. Bush performed his role as President. That’s down two percentage points from last week and the lowest level ever recorded by Rasmussen Reports. The decline in the President’s ratings come as the Rasmussen Consumer Index also hovers around record lows—72% of Americans believe that economic conditions are getting worse.
Sixty-five percent (65%) disapprove of the President’s Performance, up two points from a week ago.
[…]The weekly figures also represents a two-point decline from the numbers recorded during the full month of April. During that month, 34% of Americans gave the President their approval. That too was an all-time low, the lowest full-month approval rating ever for the President measured by Rasmussen Reports.
[…]Prior to this month, the President’s lowest approval rating was 35%, recorded in June, 2007. In two other months, his approval has been as low as 36% (May 2007 and March 2008).
And just yesterday, a new low from a new ABC/Washington Post poll:
Public disgruntlement neared a record high and George W. Bush slipped to his career low in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll. Eighty-two percent of Americans now say the country’s seriously off on the wrong track, up 10 points in the past year to a point from its record high in polls since 1973. And just 31 percent approve of Bush’s job performance overall, while 66 percent disapprove.
The country’s mood – and the president’s ratings – are suffering from the double whammy of an unpopular war and a faltering economy. Consistently for the past year, nearly two-thirds of Americans have said the war in Iraq was not worth fighting. And consumer confidence is near its lowest in weekly ABC News polls since late 1985.
Bush’s approval rating has been extraordinarily stable – before today’s 31 percent it had
been 32 or 33 percent in nine ABC/Post polls from last July through last month.
Whew…and that is just the last couple of weeks!
As this election season geared up, we heard a lot of wishful thinking on the part of Righties suggesting that 2006 was the one and only opportunity for Democrats to make significant gains. In part the rationale seemed to be that candidates wouldn’t have a Bush administration to drag ’em down. Maybe…but there has been an avalanche of bad omens for Republicans lately: Bush’s new records, congressional special elections going Democratic in previously strong Republican districts, record high Democratic identity, and unprecedented fundraising asymmetries in favor of the Democrats.
Isn’t it time to reevaluate these Republican loyalists? I mean, when does the pattern of self-deception and delusions qualify as psychopathology?