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By the Numbers
Like a broken record, the dinosaur media has gleefully and consistently reminded us that President Bush’s approval rating is hovering in the low 30’s. Pelosi, Reid, and Co. have taken advantage of every opportunity to gloat about how out of touch the President is, and they use these poll numbers to prove that Bush is unwilling to listen to his constituency.
Today, in a story you won’t hear mentioned anywhere by The Media, Gallup reports the findings of their most recent approval rating polls. As expected, Bush’s approval rating was 33%, just two points lower than his to-date 2007 average. Of those surveyed, 62% disapprove of his performance, with 73% of Republicans surveyed saying they approve of the President, compared to just 9% of Democrats.
OK, so that’s not really news. Bush’s approval rating hasn’t been above 40% since September of last year, and the network anchors just won’t let us forget it. What is newsworthy, however, is the approval rating the American people ascribed to their representatives in Congress.
Gallup found that Congress’ approval rating is a meager 29%, or four points lower than that of the president. Since January, the Democrats have enjoyed majority status in both houses of Congress, yet just 37% of Democrats say they approve of what the Congress is doing. Those numbers could hardly be described as a “mandate.”
The cheap and easy way to spin this (and considering how The Media handles itself, it’s tempting) would be to shake my finger and say that all of America disapproves of the way the Democrats are conducting themselves. I could assert that everyone is as mad as I am that they are playing politics with the funding of the war, and that there is an overwhelming consensus that we should stay in Iraq and let our troops finish what they started. Oh, if only it were so!
The reality, from what I can tell, is that there are plenty of Republicans who would agree with the above statements. However, there are also plenty of Democrats who think that their congressional representatives should have already pulled the plug on Bush’s cowboy-esque adventure in the desert. With half the country thinking them traitors for not funding the war and the other half thinking them cowards for not ending the war during their “100 hour plan,” it is easy to see how their approval rating could sink so low.
The same explanation also holds up for Bush. Democrats continue to hate Bush at an alarming level, with their approval of the President hanging in the single-digits for much of the last year. Bush could invent the antidote for global warming (if, indeed, we were in need of such a thing), and liberals would still hate him for not thinking of it sooner. On the other side of the aisle, many Republicans are sore at Bush for not being bold enough on Iraq, illegal immigration, entitlement reform, and on and on and on. His numbers are in the drink because both sides disapprove of the job he’s doing, but not for the same reasons.
The numbers never lie, but sometimes the people reporting them do. Keep this in mind the next time one of the network news readers gets all pink-cheeked while telling you just how rotten a job President Bush is doing.