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

reported that “President George W. Bush’s approval ratings are now the lowest for any president the day before a State of the Union speech since Richard Nixon in 1974.” And unlike previous presidents, most of whom reached all-time approval-rating lows in the mid-30s, George Bush’s unpopularity has been sustained, spending virtually all of 2006 and the early months of 2007 mired in the mid-to-low 30s. The only convincing comparison one can make is the collapse of the Lyndon Johnson presidency, which—like Bush’s collapse—was tied not to some fleeting event or scandal, but to a deeply unpopular war that dragged on without end.
Even as early as the end of 2005, Gary Langer of ABC News noted the historic nature of George Bush’s unpopularity and drew the comparison this way:

An increasingly unpopular war, an ethics cloud, and broad economic discontent have pushed public opinion of the Bush administration from bad to worse, infecting not only the president’s ratings on political issues but his personal credentials for honesty and leadership as well….
A striking feature of the president’s predicament is the intensity of sentiment against him. Just 20 percent of Americans “strongly” approve of his work in office, the fewest of his career; more than twice as many, 47 percent, strongly disapprove, the most yet seen….
Bush’s troubles stand out, in large part because they’re rooted not just in economic concerns but in an increasingly unpopular war. That invites comparisons to Lyndon B. Johnson, whose approval rating suffered each year as the country became more enmeshed in Vietnam—dropping in Gallup data from 75 percent on average in 1964, to 43 percent in 1967 and 1968. Bush, for his part, has gone from an average of 73 percent approval in 2000 and 2001 to 46 percent, on average, so far this year. The trend lines are strikingly similar.

This dramatic, wholesale erosion of support for the president continued after Langer drew the LBJ comparison and it has now been sustained over a much longer period of time. It spans the ideological and demographic spectrum and appears largely irreversible. Analyzing a February 2006 poll showing the president with new lows in approval and popularity ratings, political scientist Richard Stoll of Rice University observed that it “suggests that he’s pretty much down to his core supporters out there…and everyone else has left ” (emphasis added).
Though catalyzed by the catastrophe in Iraq, this collapse had plenty of other authors. From the outset, the president’s second term was plagued by a series of embarrassing domestic failures that, as an accompaniment to the unraveling of Iraq, exacerbated perceptions of Bush’s startling ineptitude. The president’s campaign to overhaul Social Security—his flamboyantly touted second-term “legacy” program—flopped from the start, his proposals pushed away even by his own party, which made him appear weak and ineffective. The failed Supreme Court nomination of his loyal aide Harriet Miers was fueled almost entirely by his own supporters and further eroded the powerful, almost omnipotent aura that had surrounded him during the heyday of his first term. The palpable sloth and indifference that characterized his reaction to the Katrina disaster chipped away further at his image of strength and Americans’ confidence in his ability to “protect” them. The fiasco over his attempt to turn over America’s port operations to a company owned by the United Arab Emirates even raised questions about whether he was sufficiently committed to protecting the country against the threat of Islamic terrorism, the only asset which had, until that point, been immune from attack. As the president’s second term slogged along, his few remaining strengths were gradually diluted until they disappeared completely.
But it was the disaster in Iraq that provided the essential framework in which all of these other failures unfolded. There