Despite Instability in Iraq, Bush Has Strong Support, Poll Finds
By JOHN HARWOOD and JEANNE CUMMINGS
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
WASHINGTON -- Despite criticism over prewar intelligence and postwar casualties, President Bush retains surprisingly strong support on Iraq, and he benefits from rising optimism about the economy, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found.
Mr. Bush made clear that he believes he has turned a corner on his recent political difficulties by staging his first extended postwar news conference.
In a confident, even feisty performance, Mr. Bush for the first time accepted personal responsibility for the disputed "16 words" in his State of the Union address about Iraq's nuclear-weapons program, hailed the successful strike that killed Saddam Hussein's two sons, expressed opposition to gay marriage and trumpeted tax cuts that he says are beginning to produce more robust economic growth.
Mr. Bush's overall popularity has declined in recent weeks to 56% from 62% in May, with similar drops in assessments of his leadership. Yet he has held some of the advantages he gained following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and is rated more highly by the public than President Clinton was at a similar point in advance of his re-election campaign. The survey of 1,007 adults, conducted between July 26 and 28, has a margin for error of 3.1 percentage points.
"He's down about where incumbents are when they're in pretty good shape" for re-election, observes Republican pollster Robert Teeter, who conducts the Journal/NBC poll with his Democratic counterpart Peter Hart. What still isn't clear, Mr. Hart adds, is whether "the escalator [is] going down, or has the escalator hit the bottom and is going back up?"
The survey showed that a solid 66% of Americans approve of Mr. Bush's handling of the war on terrorism, though approval of his foreign policy is a less robust 55%. Some 37% say that postwar events have diminished their trust in Mr. Bush "somewhat" or "a great deal," but an identical proportion say their trust in the president has increased. And by a margin of 56% to 30%, Americans say Democrats are "mostly playing politics" about the administration's rationale for war rather than offering "legitimate criticism."
Even more striking is the fact that continuing casualties -- at least 110 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq since Mr. Bush declared major combat operations over on May 1 -- haven't eroded public support for the military's continued role in Iraq. Roughly seven in 10 Americans say the U.S. should have taken action to remove Saddam Hussein from power, and nearly six in 10 say U.S. troops should remain in Iraq as long as necessary, even if the reconstruction process takes five years.
The survey suggested that public attitudes have been buoyed by the recent killings of Saddam Hussein's two sons. Sixty percent of Americans say that development will make it easier to establish a stable, democratic government in Iraq, though a majority continues to believe that capturing or killing Mr. Hussein himself is necessary to conclude the war successfully.
"In my line of work, it's best to produce results," Mr. Bush said at his news conference held Wednesday in the Rose Garden. On the so-far fruitless search for weapons of mass destruction, he said "to placate the critics and the cynics about intentions of the U.S., we need to produce evidence." He said that Pentagon teams are scouring Iraq while a new Iraqi governing council is just beginning to stabilize the country. Mr. Bush appealed for patience, and the poll indicated Americans are willing to comply.
"I never have expected Thomas Jefferson to emerge in Iraq in a 90-day period," he quipped.
Mr. Bush claimed responsibility for telling the American people in his State of the Union address that one reason for going to war was a British report that Iraq had tried to buy uranium in Africa to jumpstart its nuclear program. That charge was considered unreliable by some U.S. government intelligence agencies, and the White House acknowledged last week that the Central Intelligence Agency warned months in advance of the January speech that the disputed assertion shouldn't be included in Mr. Bush's broader case for war.
Speaking through an aide, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice recently took blame for not deleting the material from the president's speech. Asked if Ms. Rice should be held accountable, Mr. Bush called her an "honest, fabulous person" and said the U.S. is "lucky" she serves in the government.
Beyond steady public support for the war, the White House is benefiting from a modest increase in public assessments of economic conditions. Some 45% of Americans say the economy will improve over the next year, nearly triple the number who expect it to get worse. That is a significantly more optimistic assessment than Americans expressed in January. Confidence in the stock market continues rising in tandem with share prices on Wall Street, and Americans embrace the White House-backed push in Congress to add prescription-drug benefits to Medicare.
Growing deficits still pose a potential economic threat, and Mr. Bush acknowledged that his tax cuts caused about 25% of this year's expected deficit of more than $450 billion. But the survey showed that, by a 60%-to-35% margin, the public considers stimulating the economy a higher priority that controlling the deficit.
The survey isn't uniformly gloomy for Democrats. Though Mr. Bush's 56% approval rating exceeds Mr. Clinton's 47% showing from July 1995, it's below the 67% mark President George H.W. Bush received in July 1991 in advance of his losing 1992 campaign. By a 45%-to-36% plurality, Americans say they are likely to back Mr. Bush in 2004 over the Democratic candidates, a significantly narrower margin that his more than 20 percentage point edge in April after the war had begun. In prospective matchups with former Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts and Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, Mr. Bush leads by 15 percentage points or more.
With the electorate still polarized along partisan lines, the poll shows that Democrats enter the 2004 campaign with advantages on such significant issues as handling the economy, education and health care. Even on tax policy, three tax cuts have left Mr. Bush only breaking even with his Democratic adversaries.
Yet those Democratic advantages are smaller than the huge gap in Republicans' favor on the security issues that have moved to the forefront of American politics since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. By margins of more than 2 to 1, Americans prefer Mr. Bush and his party on both the war on terrorism and homeland security. The latter finding is especially unwelcome news for Democrats since party leaders in Congress as well as the 2004 presidential field have repeatedly accused Mr. Bush of shortchanging homeland security while promoting his drive for regime change in Iraq.
Mr. Bush played to those advantages at his news conference. He said the transformation of Iraq could stabilize a region that has become a breeding ground for anti-U.S. sentiment, and he warned other nations against interfering with U.S. efforts there or his administration's attempts to foster peace between Palestinians and the Israelis. He specifically warned Iran not to develop nuclear weapons.
"The stated objective of Iran is the destruction of Israel," Mr. Bush said, "and we've got to work in a collective way with other nations to remind Iran that they shouldn't develop a nuclear weapon."
On domestic matters, Mr. Bush brandished both sides of his "compassionate conservative" philosophy. He appealed for public tolerance of homosexuality, a stance that tracks the poll's finding that Americans, by a 53%-to-34% margin, back legal and financial benefits for gay and lesbian couples. At the same time, Mr. Bush endorsed legislation making same-sex marriages illegal; in the poll, Americans expressed a similar view by 51% to 32%.
Regarding his re-election bid, Mr. Bush betrayed no embarrassment about the lopsided financial advantage he enjoys over Democratic rivals. Asked how he could spend $170 million on a primary campaign in which he faces no opposition, he replied with a grin, "Just watch."
Write to John Harwood at john.harwood@wsj.com and Jeanne Cummings at jeanne.cummings@wsj.com
Updated July 31, 2003 10:51 a.m.
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