Bad news for President George Bush and Congress: a new poll shows many Americans think you are effectiveness challenged.
Don’t quit your day jobs. Oh, wait: those are your day jobs…The poll numbers:
President Bush’s standing with the public is slumping just three months into his final term, but Americans have an even lower regard for the job being done by Congress. Bush’s job approval is at 44 percent, with 54 percent disapproving. Only 37 percent have a favorable opinion of the work being done by the Republican-controlled Congress, according to an AP-Ipsos poll.
Bush’s job approval was at 49 percent in January, while Congress was at 41 percent.
“This is a pretty sour spring,” said Karlyn Bowman, a public opinion analyst at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. “People are not very impressed by what Bush is doing or by what Congress is doing Democrats or Republicans.”
Record high gasoline prices, nervousness about the future of Social Security, the ongoing Iraq war and the Terri Schiavo case are all contributing, political analysts said.
Republicans in Congress and the president moved quickly during the Easter recess to approve legislation intended to prolong the life of Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman who died after her feeding tube was disconnected.
The number supporting Bush’s handling of some domestic issues dipped between March and April, to 42 percent for the economy and 38 percent for issues like education and health care, according to the poll conducted for The Associated Press by Ipsos-Public Affairs.
Support for the president’s approach to his top domestic priority, Social Security, remained at 36 percent, while 58 percent oppose it.
Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio said Bush faces an uphill battle with his plan to allow younger workers to invest some of their Social Security taxes in personal investment accounts.
“With the Social Security plan itself, they’re fundamentally trying to sell a plan that isn’t popular,” Fabrizio said. “They’re flying into the wind.”
Young adults are supposed to benefit the most from Bush’s Social Security proposal, but a majority of that group, 54 percent, opposes the president on that issue.
If the administration’s Social Security plan isn’t dead, it certainly sounds like it has a feeding tube in it keeping it alive. Most troubling: Bush’s approval rating is down and the question is — barring some foreign or terrorism crisis — what can happen to help him win over more voters? He’s early into his second term and, traditionally, Presidents don’t grow more popular as their second terms unfold. And the further a President moves into his second term, the more his clout is reduced as lame-duck-itus sets in. Karl Rove: are you putting in some overtime?
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.