Bush's sinking popularity
With his Social Security plan in a vegetative state and the Iraq war mired in chaos, the president's poll numbers are tanking. Is he pulling the Republican Party down with him?
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Farhad Manjoo
April 29, 2005 | George W. Bush lost the 2000 presidential election by half a million votes and saw the result as a mandate to rewrite the tax code and redraw the map of the world. So when he won the 2004 election by 3 million votes, liberals could have been excused for wondering what the weather would be like in Vancouver for the next four years.
Bush's second-term agenda was so unapologetically bold -- he wanted to privatize Social Security, flatten federal taxes, remake the courts and, on the side, democratize the world -- it bordered on the revolutionary. In November, as liberals were sunk in the delirium of defeat, their in boxes buzzing with comic maps dividing North America into the United States of Canada and Jesusland, it seemed that nothing could rein the Republican president in.
Six months later, Bush is the dog that didn't bite. He approaches the end of the first 100 days of his second term with approval ratings that fall below those of all other reelected presidents in the modern era. Americans aren't happy with the direction in which the country is heading. They don't like the economy, and they don't like the war. They also don't like Bush's plans for the nation. If it isn't already dead, Bush's signature domestic-policy effort, the plan to privatize Social Security, is in a persistent vegetative state; hated by Democrats, independents and even Republicans, only divine intervention can save it.
Now the question is whether Bush's sinking popularity -- and his desire to stick with the unpopular Social Security plan -- will hurt the Republican Party's agenda over the next two years and beyond. The GOP continues to advocate world-changing plans. Conservatives want to amend the Constitution, alter the Senate's rules on judicial nominees, and disrupt long-standing fiscal, environmental, global and social norms. At the same time, Bush looks boxed in. There's no money in the federal till to implement his tax cuts. The military's stretched too thin for him to invade another country (such as Iran). And the federal courts are holding his social agenda in check.
Some key Republicans are beginning to balk at Bush's extremism. On questions involving the Social Security plan, or the details of the federal budget, or the confirmation of Bush's nominees, a few moderate Republicans have begun to go against White House plans. If the American public continues to turn away from Bush, political strategists say, it's only logical to expect more defections from their Republican representatives on Capitol Hill.
"If this guy was riding a 60 percent approval rating, it would be different," says Ruy Teixeira, the Democratic pollster who runs the popular blog Donkey Rising. But if members of Congress begin to realize that Bush isn't popular with the American public, "that makes them more willing to defy him."
It's not entirely accurate to say that the polls show the country as recently turning against Bush. What's truer is that the country never really liked him. Only a minority of Americans have consistently agreed with his positions on most questions of policy. The main reason the majority chose him last November was his tough stance on a single issue: terrorism. Yet hard-line conservatives saw the 2004 election as a green light for right-wing radicalism -- as a sign that the public wanted Social Security privatization, a change to the tax code, and a generally conservative social agenda (including a prohibition on gay marriage).
Bush was only too happy to oblige. He "has gone very public with very unpopular ideas," says Karl Agne, a consultant who works with Democracy Corps, a political strategy organization dedicated to restoring Democrats to national prominence. Bush believed he could stake out radical positions and bring the public to his side. It's not hard to see why: Even though he won by a slight majority, Bush had good reason to believe that he could push his issues through the Congress. As political scientist Michael Nelson has pointed out, there was something unique about Bush's victory -- he managed to expand his party's grip on Congress, which Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, all of whom were reelected with larger popular-vote margins, failed to do.
According to Frank Newport, who runs the Gallup Poll, Bush's popularity peaked in early February, around the time of his State of the Union address. He was on top of the world -- 57 percent of those surveyed approved of his performance and 40 percent disapproved. In his speech, Bush sought to link his apparent foreign-policy successes, such as the election in Iraq, to his domestic-policy goals. Just as the American people had supported him on the war in Iraq, so, too, did Bush want them to support his judicial nominations, his tax plan and especially his goal to privatize Social Security.
That support failed to materialize -- and his approval numbers have been plummeting. In Gallup's latest poll, Bush scores a 48 percent approval rating and a disapproval rating of 49 percent. (Other surveys report similar numbers.)
Pollsters point to many reasons for Bush's decline, including high gas prices and the Republicans' unpopular decision to intervene in the Terri Schiavo case. But by far the main issue pushing Bush down, they say, is his ambition to privatize Social Security. It literally is the case that "the more he talks about it, the lower his ratings go," says Newport.
But as Paul Krugman has noted, Bush's Social Security plan is only one skein of the radicalism that runs through all of his second-term proposals -- on economic policy, on social policy and on foreign policy, Bush favors right-wing ideas that, polls show, appeal to only a minority of Americans. It's possible, then, to see the public's rejection of the Social Security plan as a rejection of radical conservatism. Americans may have given Republicans the keys to Washington, but they didn't want them to run roughshod over the place. |
