How low can Bush numbers go?

The latest CBS News poll has support for the president and his vice president dropping to 34 percent and 18 percent, respectively. If you add them together and divide by 2, you get a joint approval rating of 26 percent, 2 points above Richard Nixon's pre-resignation level.
How did George W. Bush drop so low? There are many moving parts: Gas prices are high, pensions are fading and the working class is struggling.
There are events that make it look like the fix is in for those in power: Halliburton caught but not punished for gouging the military, a drug bill benefiting drug companies, a Bush crony who is governor of Mississippi getting Katrina reconstruction money while New Orleans gets stiffed.
And there is, of course, the war.
For all these troubles, and many more, Bush would be doing better if he hadn't lost his ear. Gone is the man who picked up the bullhorn at ground zero, replaced by someone so clueless about the Dubai ports deal that he admitted he was out of the loop on the decision and then stubbornly went on to defend it.
Rovie, you're not doing one heckuva job. The Old Bush would have announced he was going to get to the bottom of the Dubai decision now that he was on the case. He would have feigned alarm, if not felt it, that a company owned by the country that was home to two of the 9/11 hijackers, and that recognized the Taliban but not Israel, would be doing business at six major U.S. ports.
Instead he gave his ace in the hole, 9/11, to others to play, and vowed to use his first veto to bat down any attempt to second-guess him. As his own party balked, he said he would let the 45-day review that the law requires take place after all, so Congress could come to see the facts as he does.
With 70 percent of the populace against the ports deal, the Old Bush wouldn't have let opponents be labeled racist xenophobes who are too unsophisticated to understand the nuances of global trade. I hear you, he would say, and I'm going to get to the bottom of this. Then he could have proceeded to do the deal anyway without the hemorrhaging.
But it's not just ports where Bush has gone tone deaf. He has so lost his touch on Iraq that even the military is turning against him. In a recent Zogby poll, only 23 percent of the troops agree with Bush that we should stay as long as necessary; 72 percent want out in a year.
With that goes one of Bush's most useful lines of defense. Whenever criticized for his policies in Iraq, Bush claimed the troops on the ground were with him, while taking a swipe at the patriotism of critics for undermining the troops.
Indeed, until now, the troops were with him, as you would expect. If you're risking your life in Iraq and have no choice about it, you believe it's for a worthy cause, or go crazy. If a friend dies, you have to believe it wasn't in vain. It's why there are fewer grieving parents against the war and more who cling to the notion that a child died for a good reason.
Our troops realize that the so-called Iraqi forces fighting alongside them aren't rising to the task at hand. No matter what Bush says, the number of battle-ready Iraqi battalions is somewhere around zero. Even among the Iraqi police and troops who can shoot straight and don't run away when attacked, there are imposters and infiltrators.
What's worse, now that sectarian violence has increased, it's hard to tell who's an enemy or a friend. Iraqis who used to live side by side are attacking each other on the basis of sect alone. Americans are in the middle.
Bush's own hand-picked intelligence czar, John Negroponte, predicts that the sect-on-sect violence unleashed in Iraq is so virulent it could inflame the whole Middle East. Instead of spreading democracy in the Middle East by invading Iraq, the U.S. may well be spreading civil war.
It's a mess, and if we're waiting for it to get straightened out before leaving, we are there for many, many years.
But Bush hasn't changed his rhetoric to fit the situation. In an interview on ABC last week, he defaulted to his two bromides on the war -- when Iraqis stand up, we will stand down, and the elections show that democracy is working. He even said, "We're making pretty good progress." With the mosques still burning and a curfew still in effect, that's in the category of Mission Accomplished.
If the military support is softening, it joins Bush's other constituencies in going wobbly. Bush is losing ground among his most loyal constituency, Republicans, where his approval may be lower than 34 percent if two obsessively loyal congressional leaders, Sen. Bill Frist and Rep. Dennis Hastert, fearlessly denouncing his Dubai decision are any indication.
It could be lower in the public at large, as well. I wonder how many of the 34 percent don't want to admit to a stranger on the phone how worried they are. "Fine, he's doing fine. Now don't call me again."
Of course, the religious right, enjoying rapture over Justice Samuel Alito, is still on board. That makes up 20 percent. So I'm going with the unscientific Carlson poll at 26 percent, splitting the difference between Bush's number and Cheney's.

Bush base key to McCain success in '08

WASHINGTON - Sen. John McCain's support of the Dubai port proposal is just the latest controversial issue on which the Arizona senator has backed President Bush. And that is no accident, political analysts say. Other Republicans can afford to distance themselves from a lame-duck president whose popularity has dropped to near record lows. But experts say that if McCain decides to seek the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, as many in the party expect him to do, he must show his loyalty in order to sway the distrustful Bush base. McCain has no choice, because "he's got reverse Hillary-itis," said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion at Marist College in New York. While Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York is solid with core Democrats but not so popular with independent voters, McCain is "solid with independents but has trouble reaching out to the base," Miringoff said in an interview.

In the latest Marist Poll, conducted in mid-February by Miringoff, McCain was the only possible 2008 candidate who was named by more than 50 percent of voters as someone who should run for president. He did so on the strength of "crossover appeal" to independents and Democrats unrivaled by any of the other 25 politicians from both parties in the poll, Miringoff noted. Dante Scala, a professor at St. Anselm College and an expert on New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation presidential primary, takes his analysis of McCain's political appeal a step further. "McCain is unusual among politicians in that in some sense, independents are his base," Scala said in an interview. That's fine in a general election, but not necessary an asset in the Republican primaries, he added. McCain won the New Hampshire Republican primary in 2000, largely on the strength of independent voters' support. But not long after that, his bid for the GOP nomination ran aground in South Carolina against a rejuvenated Bush campaign and its motivated base of social and religious conservatives, the dominant force in the national party.

Not surprisingly, then, as he assessing his chances in a second run for the GOP nomination, McCain is actively courting key figures in the Bush political network throughout the country, but especially in South Carolina. In January, for example, he held a meeting in a Spartanburg hotel with Bush loyalists, including Bush's state finance co-chairman, Barry Wynn. Two months before that, he lunched in Columbia with Bush fund-raisers John Rainey and C. Edward Floyd. And the senator's political advisers are trying to sign strategist Warren Tompkins, who ran the Bush campaigns in South Carolina in 2000 and 2004. McCain also has the backing of the South Carolina's senior senator, Lindsey Graham, perhaps the most popular politician in the state. That will help a lot, said Jack Bass, a College of Charleston professor who has written extensively about Southern politics. But "just what the Bush superloyalists will do is unclear," Bass said in an interview. South Carolina's large veteran and military retiree population will be "a significant source of strength" for McCain, who spent nearly seven years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, Bass noted.


But McCain's return to South Carolina after his loss in 2000 to apologize for not speaking out against the display of the Confederate flag at the state Capitol "won't help him with flag supporters," who overwhelmingly supported Bush, Bass added. Still, once Bush started running for re-election in 2004, "McCain has been mending fences with the conservatives almost as fast as Tom Sawyer," said Tom Schaller, a University of Maryland professor who is publishing a book this fall about Southern politics, "Whistling Past Dixie." Not only did McCain campaign aggressively for Bush's re-election, but in the 14 months since Bush's second term began, few senators have stood with the president as closely as McCain, even as the president's poll numbers steadily declined. Although McCain sponsored anti-torture legislation, he vigorously defended the increasingly unpopular war in Iraq. He brokered a deal that cleared the way for confirmation of the president's judicial nominees, including two Supreme Court justices, a top priority of religious conservatives. And amid GOP complaints about allowing a Dubai company to run the ports in six American cities, he urged caution and prudence. Moreover, he has spearheaded a compromise with Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., on legislation to rewrite America's immigration laws, an issue that divides both political parties. And as the scandal surrounding disgraced GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff has threatened to derail the Republican Party's efforts to retain control of Congress in the election this fall, McCain has used his reputation as a reformer to press legislation aimed at cracking down on influence-peddling on Capitol Hill.

John Weaver, McCain's chief political adviser, dismissed the suggestion of experts that the senator is unpopular with a large segment of Bush supporters. "We don't see it," he insisted. In most public opinion polls in recent months, McCain typically has been at the top, and "surely that isn't coming just from people who are not supporters of the president," Weaver said in an interview. Besides, he added, McCain "doesn't make decisions based on who he needs to curry favor with. The word 'curry' is not in his vocabulary." Nevertheless, having skipped the Iowa caucus in 2000, McCain is planning a trip there next month to aid the gubernatorial campaign of Rep. Jim Nussle. That should help him curry, or rather cultivate, the favor of Republicans in one of the most important states in the presidential nominating process. Victories in Iowa and New Hampshire could provide enough momentum for McCain to weather any setbacks in South Carolina and other Southern states where he remains suspect. If so, "the main question national Republicans will have to ask themselves is whether they want to risk nominating somebody less prominent and popular (with independents and Democrats) than McCain," said Schaller. "People like (Bush political adviser) Karl Rove must decide if they are going to vouch for McCain among wary conservatives or let the conservatives go after him."

San Francisco Supervisors Ask Lawmakers to Impeach Bush

San Francisco's supervisors jumped into national politics Tuesday, passing a resolution asking the city's Democratic congressional delegation to seek the impeachment of President Bush for failing to perform his duties by leading the country into war in Iraq, eroding civil liberties and engaging in other activities the board sees as transgressions.
The supervisors, in voting 7-3 for the resolution, made it likely that San Francisco again will become grist for radio and TV talk shows. The city has appeared in the national media spotlight recently for voters' passage in November of a nonbinding measure banning military recruiters from public high schools and for Supervisor Gerardo Sandoval's recent comment on a Fox News show that the United States doesn't need a military.
Supervisor Chris Daly, one of the most progressive members of the board, sponsored the resolution, which also calls for the impeachment of Vice President Dick Cheney. Daly said the measure is justified in light of the administration's case for and handling of the war in Iraq, the federal government's inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina and recent revelations about a domestic wiretapping program."I think the case is clear, and I think it's appropriate for us to weigh in," Daly said.

San Francisco City Council Joins Impeachment Movement

While we were working in the last week to raise sufficient funds to place the full page newspaper ad in the San Francisco Chronicle before March 18, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors (the city council) voted by a 7-3 margin to support the impeachment of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. The resolution calls on the Democratic delegation from the city to move for impeachment. The timing of the ad couldn't be better. Similar resolutions are being offered in city councils around the country. The people must use all avenues to pursue this growing nationwide grassroots movement.


Just last week tens of thousands of people participated in the People’s Impeachment Lobby by sending letters to their Congressional Representatives.
Last Thursday, New York City’s historic Town Hall Theatre in Times Square filled up with people supporting impeachment. The event was sponsored by Harper’s magazine. Many of those in attendance took the ImpeachBush.org/VoteToImpeach.org petitions home with them promising to collect signatures in the coming weeks.
Radio personality Garrison Keillor has just released an article entitled "Impeach Bush." and actor Richard Dreyfuss called for impeachment, while speaking before the National Press Club in Washington.
28 members of US Congress have now signed on to H Res 635, including US Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), the original co-sponsor. The current 28 total co-sponsors are Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-HI), Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Rep. Lois Capps (D-CA), Rep. William Lacy Clay (D-MO), Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), Rep. Sam Farr (D-CA), Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY), Rep. Mike Honda (D-CA), Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX), Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA), Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA), Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-GA), Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI), Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), Rep. James Oberstar (D-MN), Rep. John Olver (D-MA), Rep. Major Owens (D-NY), Rep. Donald Payne (D-NJ), Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY), Rep. Martin Sabo (D-MN), Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), Rep. Fortney Pete Stark (D-CA), Rep. John Tierney (D-MA), Rep. Nydia Velazquez (D-NY), Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), and Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA).
Everyone who has been active with ImpeachBush.org/VoteToImpeach.org as a volunteer, activist or donor should be proud. When this movement started, we were confronted by the naysayers who said it couldn’t be done. Bush was tall in the saddle back then. The people who have made this movement come alive didn’t persevere because the issue was “popular.” People have sacrificed to make this movement happen because it is critically important. There was too much at stake to remain passive.


My only question, What took so Long?