Worse Than Cheney Bush Approval Thuds to 28 Percent Pierre Tristam / Candide’s Notebooks, April 26, 2007
"My job is a job to make decisions. I'm a decision—if the job description were, what do you do—it's decision maker."—Tipp City, Ohio, April 19, 2007 [from the Bushisms of the Day]
The Wall Street Journal reports that Bush's approval rating, in the latest Harris Poll, hit its lowest level since inauguration, although "he's not alone: For the first time since the series began, all of the political figures and institutions included in the survey have negative performance ratings. Of the 1,001 American adults polled online April 20-23, only 28% had a positive view of Mr. Bush's job performance, down from 32% in February and from a high of 88% in the aftermath of the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001." Just as remarkable: Bush's negative rating of 70 percent is two points higher than Dick Cheney (even though Cheney's approval rating of 25 percent is still lower than Bush's). A few caveats. On PollingReport.com, where all the major polls are tabulated, Bush is still in the mid-30s according to most polls except CBS, which has him at 31 (CBS usually has him lower than most). The highest disapproval rating among those is 62 percent. But does approval or disapproval matter anymore? The numbers make no difference in the way Bush conducts himself. To the contrary. He may even use them to his advantage, playing the beleaguered card, as he surely will in his showdown with Congress over the Iraq war bill. His spinners will make him look besieged and turn the issue in his favor: he's the one denying the troops their funding and equipment, he's the one denying them the right to come home, yet he'll be the one who'll come out looking like the hero.
V. S. Naipaul Flatters Himself (As He So Often Does)
“That idea of ruin and dereliction, of out-of-placeness, was something I felt about myself, attached to myself: a man from another hemisphere, another background, coming to rest in middle life in the cottage of a half-neglected estate, an estate full of reminders of its Edwardian past, with few connections with the present. An oddity among the estates and big houses of the valley, and I a further oddity in its grounds. I felt unanchored and strange. Everything I saw in those early days, as I took my surroundings in, everything I saw on my daily walk, beside the windbreak or along the wide grassy way, made that feeling more acute. I felt that my presence in that old valley was part of something like an upheaval, a change in the course of the history of the country.”
