The first President George Bush has gotten an image boost…due to the job performance of the second President Bush:
Only one in four Americans believe President Bush is a better president than his father, George H. W. Bush, a new CNN poll has found.
Six in 10 said the elder Bush, who served one term from 1989-1993, did a better job in office, according to a poll conducted by Opinion Research Corporation. Twelve percent said both were equally good or bad, and 2 percent offered no opinion.
One reason is that the first GHWB forumulated policy in a more traditional way: talk to advisors, look at all sides, then make a judgment, decision and implement. That’s the traditional way policies have been made by Presidents of both parties for years.
In the case of the present GWB, we have an administration that makes policies based on ideology and what’s in the President’s heart. It almost sounds like what the late Columbia Pictures chief Harry Cohen used to say about a movie: if he sat and watched it and his fanny didn’t twitch it was a good movie. Some Bush administration policies seem as if they were made the same way. And if you read Bob Woodward’s book you realize Iraq policy was policy by positive affirmation. MORE:
The poll also found that 59 percent disapprove of President Bush’s handling of his job; 38 percent approve of it.
That isn’t a steep decline in Bush’s present Benny’s Bargain Basement ratings. But this is not good news for the White House or the GOP:
The poll, which interviewed 1,025 adult Americans by telephone from Friday through Sunday, also found that most Americans expressed more confidence in congressional Democrats than in President Bush in handling the nation’s major issues.
More than a majority of the people polled said congressional Democrats were better able than Bush to handle the situation in Iraq, foreign affairs and also taxes, the economy, and the federal deficit — three signature GOP issues.
Sixty-one percent said Democrats were better able than Bush to handle the deficit — the same vote of confidence Democrats received on traditional Democratic issues, such as Social Security and health care.
On Iraq, 53 percent of those polled said they were more confident in Democrats than in Bush; 38 percent felt Bush had a better grasp. An even larger margin — 57 percent — expressed confidence in Democrats’ ability to handle the economy; 36 percent had more confidence in Bush.
Bush and the Democrats are virtually tied on the issue of terrorism, however.
This means that Congressional Democrats — providing they don’t blow it before they take over (and some seem to be working hard to do just that) — will be positioned to be real players in policy in terms of public feelings of legitimacy.
It will be tougher for the White House to just ignore Democrats in 2007 and govern with its usual strategy of just playing to the GOP party base. Which doesn’t mean they won’t do just that.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.