A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency Read Online Free PDF Page A

president. Three years ago, positive one-word descriptions of Bush far outnumbered negative ones. Over the past two years, the positive-negative balance has been roughly equal. But the one-word characterizations have turned decidedly negative since last July.
Currently, 48% use a negative word to describe Bush compared with just 28% who use a positive term, and 10% who use neutral language.

The 2007 Pew poll was even worse for the president. Incompetent continued to be the leading adjective, this time from 34 percent of the respondents. Second was arrogant, the adjective selected by 25 percent; the word idiot continued to attract a sizable portion as well (19 percent).
The Duelfer Report was issued in October 2004—less than one month prior to the 2004 election. As a result, the unraveling of the Bush presidency was still in its initial stage when America decided to re-elect him. Bush’s approval rating, after remaining near or above 60 percent for most of 2002 and 2003, descended to the 50 percent level in 2004—generally considered the danger zone for the re-election prospects of incumbent presidents—and it hovered there throughout the year, up to and including the election.
Opinion polls in the weeks before the election reflected a dead heat between Bush and John Kerry. Ultimately, Bush won the 2004 race by a popular-vote margin of 2.7 percentage points, the smallest margin of victory for any incumbent president since 1828. As the Los Angeles Times’ Ron Brownstein noted after the election: “Apart from Truman in 1948 (whose winning margin was 4–5 percentage points), every other president elected to a second term since 1832 has at least doubled the margin that Bush had over Kerry.” And just as was true in 2000, Bush’s 2004 victory was dependent upon a narrow victory in a single state, this time in Ohio.
Most remarkable about the narrowness of Bush’s 2004 victory is the vast array of overwhelming electoral advantages he enjoyed as an incumbent War President. Those advantages ought to have made re-election nearly assured.
Incumbent American presidents rarely lose under any circumstances. But Americans have never voted a president out of office during wartime, having comfortably re-elected all four previous wartime presidents who ran again (Madison, Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Nixon).
Beyond those towering inherent advantages, Bush barely squeaked by despite running against John Kerry, one of the most politically ungifted major party nominees in several decades; despite Kerry’s running an inept and passive presidential campaign, leading former DNC chair Terry McAuliffe to call the campaign’s failure to attack Bush’s record “one of the biggest acts of political malpractice in the history of American politics” and despite a significant financial advantage. Even with all of those formidable advantages, facing a weak opponent and an unskillful campaign, the War President, after four years of governing, won only two states in 2004 that he did not take in 2000 (Iowa and New Mexico) and even lost New Hampshire for a net gain of only one state.
Since his re-election, the president’s popularity has continued to decline steadily—at times even precipitously—to the point where George Bush has reached historic levels of sustained unpopularity. To put the collapse of the president’s popularity into context, at the time Richard Nixon was forced to resign the presidency after being battered for two years by the Watergate scandal, Nixon’s approval rating had plummeted to 25 percent—a mere seven points lower than the 32 percent approval rating registered by President Bush multiple times throughout 2006. On January 21, 2007, when CBS News issued a poll placing the president’s approval rating at 28 percent, the right-wing website Drudge Report posted a headline which read: “Bush poll ratings fall to Nixon levels.”
On the eve of the president’s 2007 State of the Union address, Bloomberg News