Bush in the Mid-Twenties

By Scott Horton

Newsweek’s new poll has Bush at 26%, but now we’ve reached something new: the average of all major polls (including the perennial Republican outliers that give Bush a 10-point bump) now have Bush in the twenties. What does that mean? Bush has no support among Democrats. He has no support among Independents. And now, for the last half year, his support among Republicans shows week-on-week steady erosion. We’re now eating well into “the base.” Why? Well, isn’t the real question: who are these 26%? Are they people who don’t read newspapers, and watch the news? Or, more likely, people who take their news from hysterical rightwing talk radio and Fox News.

Bush’s war stewardship is demonstrated to be incompetent. His cabinet is shown to be full of knaves and scoundrels. He has feverishly corrupted all the core institutions of the country. A year ago, the Beltway punditry was telling us that he had “bottomed out” around 40%, and it was impossible for him to drop any lower. As usual, they were completely wrong. And now that his numbers have reached lower-than-the-worst-days-of-Watergate levels, notice how the vacuous chattering class has suddenly stopped talking about polls?