"Values" vs "Issues" has been my take. The Zogby poll shows the same thing.
Poll: Bush's Popularity Unscathed
President Bush is still as popular as ever.
"America likes George W. Bush personally; they've bonded with him after 9/11," pollster John Zogby said. A recent Zogby poll put Bush's job performance rating at 58 percent, down slightly from a high of 61 percent in April.
A Gallup poll published last week found 3 out of 4 Americans have concluded the president is a "strong and decisive leader" and 65 percent believe he's "honest and trustworthy."
Indeed, the president's popularity can be compared to that of Ronald Reagan's, analysts said. While Americans didn't always agree with Reagan's policies, they clearly liked him as a person and gave him high marks as a leader.
So, even though there are daily casualties in Iraq and the president goofed on the Iraq-Africa uranium scenario, Americans still feel that a slowdown in the economy was the result of 9/11, that the war on terror and tax cuts are the right responses, and they trust President Bush to lead the country.
"President Bush's connection with the American people makes a lie of James Carville's famous comment, 'It's the economy, stupid,'" said John Hulsman, a senior foreign affairs analyst with the Heritage Foundation.
"By mourning with us [after 9/11], I think he made most Americans - regardless of their politics - realize that he felt what had happened as a fundamental change in the way the world worked, which I think most Americans feel regarding September 11," Hulsman said.
More importantly, Bush didn't just identify the problem, he offered a way to deal with it, as was seen by his aggressive action against terrorism in Afghanistan and the ongoing war with al-Qaeda, analysts noted.
"The link between President Bush and the American people is that we all saw that there was a dangerous world. President Bush mourned our losses and then set out to make the world less dangerous," Hulsman said.
So, will problems in Iraq have an effect on the president's chances for re-election in 2004?
Larry Sabato, a professor of political science with the University of Virginia, said Americans tend to have a binary view of foreign conflict. Either it's another Vietnam or it isn't, and the military occupation of Iraq clearly is not another Vietnam.
"Americans are happy with a victory, and they tend not to look a gift horse in the mouth. They obviously wish that the additional killings were not occurring. They wish that we had found substantial quantities of weapons of mass destruction. But the fact that everything isn't perfect doesn't detract from the overall positive impression that they have of the war," Sabato said.
zogby.com |
