Bush's approval rating: on the way up again?
Pollster.com does an average of polls, to track the trend line. Their latest shows that while President Bush's approval rating still hovers around 30%, his disapproval rating has dropped from the mid to low 60s in the last few months.
If the line does signal a trend, what does it mean?
David Timothy Hartman, one of the conservative bloggers on mvred.com, based in Youngstown, Ohio, thinks the uptick is because "Bush is pretty much out of the public spotlight from day to day." Which is good news to Hartman, who considers Bush "one of the best presidents we have had and I like him a lot."
Charles Franklin, co-developer of pollster.com and creator of the above graphic, more or less agrees that Bush benefits from being under the national radar.
"Attention turned to the primaries in January, and the rock 'em sock 'em action there pulled political focus away from the White House," he wrote in an e-mail. "Over the summer and now, the attention is almost all on Obama and McCain (and now Palin!) so again the president gets little attention."
The more surprising thing, he argues, is that declining economic conditions have not forced the president's numbers down even more. "Normally the economy is a pretty strong predictor of presidential approval, so with bad job numbers, not to mention housing and banking troubles, you'd expect approval to suffer rather than stabilize," he said.
Historically, presidents get a bump as they are leaving office, perhaps a recognition from voters that whatever the outcome, presidents try. But Franklin said he wouldn't expect to see that until December or January.
-- Johanna Neuman
Graphic: pollster.com, with permission
People are trying to forget him, just look at how they treated him and Cheney at the convention.
Hopefully he'll get a trip to the Hague, and then people will really see what he did to the world.
Posted by: Michael | September 09, 2008 at 03:23 PM