Teflon wearing thin? It is astounding that 37 percent of Americans still give George Bush a positive rating on his performance as president. (Even hard to fathom is the fact that 8 percent of Democrats approve of Bush!).
It is true, nonetheless, according to a recent USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll. In the past 50 years, only two presidents – Reagan and Clinton – have regained popularity after falling into the 30’s. The others never fully recovered from their drop in the polls:
- Bush need look no farther than his father, George H. W. Bush, who struggled with a sluggish economy in 1992. His job approval hit 39 percent in February, and in November he was voted from office.
- Carter, hurt by the Iran hostage crisis, was at 37 percent in September 1980. Two months later, he lost his re-election bid.
- Ford, who succeeded Nixon, grappled with a falling economy and high inflation. He spent much of 1975 with approval percentages in the 30s and lost to Carter in ’76.
- Nixon saw his approval rating plummet to 31 percent in the summer of 1973 as the nation followed the Watergate hearings. He resigned a year later.
- Johnson, stymied by the Vietnam War, hit 36 percent in March 1968, the month he decided not to seek re-election.
- Truman, beset by the unpopular Korean War, was at 23 percent in January 1952, when he chose not to run again.
- Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy were the only two presidents in the past 50 years to never fall below 40 percent approval. Eisenhower’s low was 49 percent in 1960, shortly after a U.S. spy plane was shot down by the Soviets. Kennedy bottomed at 56 percent in September 1963, two months before his assassination, as the public began to grow uneasy about U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
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Your government, on the basis of outrageous lies, is waging a murderous and utterly illegitimate war in Iraq, with other countries in their sights.
Your government is openly torturing people, and justifying it.
Your government puts people in jail on the merest suspicion, refusing them lawyers, and either holding them indefinitely or deporting them in the dead of night.
Your government is moving each day closer to a theocracy, where a narrow and hateful brand of Christian fundamentalism will rule.
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