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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Thomas A Watson who wrote (323395)	11/26/2002 2:41:14 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

All true statements in your post extracted from the poll results... but let's not fail to point out the actual title of the poll article: "Positive Ratings for the G.O.P., if Not Its Policy" Or some of it's major other conclusions: "Americans hold favorable views of the party and President Bush, but they are less enthusiastic about some of the policies Republicans are promoting, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll." "They are ambivalent about tax cuts, concerned about Republican plans for Social Security and strongly opposed to the administration's environmental policies." "...Those polled did not appear to be particularly happy about how the election turned out: just 37 percent described themselves as pleased, compared with 26 percent who said they were disappointed. By contrast, in 1994, the last time Republicans took control of Congress, providing a Republican counterpart to President Bill Clinton's White House, nearly 50 percent of those surveyed described themselves as pleased with the outcome." "... Mr. Bush remains extremely popular. Still, on a number of issues, there was evidence of public ambivalence or, in some cases, opposition to policies that the White House has signaled it will pursue once Republicans assume control in January." "For example, 55 percent of respondents said they disapproved of the White House effort to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, compared with 39 percent who approved. Nearly two-thirds said the federal government should do more to regulate the environmental and safety practices of business." "By a ratio of two to one, Americans said they thought that protecting the environment was more important than producing energy. By a seven-to-one ratio, respondents said that Mr. Bush believed that producing energy was more important than protecting the environment." "I don't like what he's doing to the environment, really," said James Stranz, 57, a Republican unemployed laborer from Philadelphia. "I don't think we should be ruining the environment just because big business wants more oil." Mr. Stranz added, "I support Bush because Bush didn't back down with Afghanistan." "Mr. Bush's enthusiasm for his $1.25 trillion tax cut plan is also not entirely shared by the public. Two-thirds said they would have preferred the federal surplus be used to shore up Social Security and Medicare rather than finance a tax cut. With the surplus gone, 48 percent of those polled said they did not believe it was possible to both cut taxes and reduce the federal budget deficit; 42 percent said they believed it was possible. But the respondents were evenly divided about whether they preferred to focus on reducing the deficit or cutting taxes." "Nearly 60 percent said they believed that Mr. Bush's tax cut benefited the wealthy; just over 25 percent said it benefited the middle class. Four percent said the tax cut primarily benefited the poor. Three-quarters of respondents said that the first round of tax cuts had not made a noticeable difference in their paychecks." "Americans are also evenly divided about whether future retirees should be permitted to invest part of their Social Security taxes in private accounts, as is strongly supported by Mr. Bush and many Congressional Republicans. At the same time, more than half of the respondents said they did not expect the Social Security system to be able to pay them benefits owed by the time they retire." "Despite Mr. Bush's strong standing with the American public, there were glimmers of hope for the Democrats as they begin preparing a case against Mr. Bush for the 2004 presidential race. Respondents were evenly divided when asked if they had confidence about his ability to make the right decisions about the nation's finances." "Just over half said they were confident in Mr. Bush's ability to handle an international crisis, a relatively small increase, considering what the last two years have been like; 45 percent said the same thing when Mr. Bush took office in 2001." nytimes.com