Column: Why You Shouldn't Pay Much Attention to Those Bush Poll Numbers

Liberals are depressed and conservatives delighted over George W. Bush’s sustained public support. Despite the worst national management since Herbert Hoover, despite the worst international management since Lyndon Johnson, despite a month of scandalous public testimony and a spate of best-selling books detailing presidential blunders, W’s approval rating hovers around 50 percent.

It can’t get any better than this, think conservatives. The AntiMidas, George II, is systematically destroying the American Dream and uprooting American ideals right before his victims’ eyes, yet one of every two gives him a thumbs up. The road to plutocracy is paved with Teflon. Isn’t it grand?

It can’t get any worse than this, think liberals. The AntiMidas, George II, is systematically destroying the American Dream and uprooting American ideals right before his victims’ eyes, yet one of every two gives him a thumbs up. The road to plutocracy is paved with Teflon. Isn’t it horrible?

Meanwhile, pundits are less depressed or delighted than puzzled. What could possibly account for half the nation rallying behind a recidivist bumbler? How could he lead Senator John Kerry by 48 to 43 percent (ABC News/Washington Post); 47 to 44 percent (USA Today/CNN/Gallup); and 44 to 40 percent (Investor’s Business Daily)?

How, indeed, could public support for Bush, after all his executive bungling and botching, surpass in percentages that of the certified imbecile population?

Punditry’s puzzlement is allayed by one consensus: that in times of war, the president gets the benefit of the doubt. Columnist Joshua Micah Marshall put it best last Friday in the New York Times: “The president has cast the nation on what is essentially a war of choice. To admit that the president blew it is to say the same of the public that followed him into the conflict. And like its leaders, the public … doesn't like admitting it was wrong [and] will go to great lengths to avoid doing so.”

Marshall added, however, that “the public's patience is not unlimited, and eventual failure in Iraq will almost certainly sink [Bush’s] candidacy.”

The key word there is “eventual.” Key, in that eventually conservatives will be far less delighted and liberals far less depressed over Bush’s reelection prospects, given that the president’s Middle East policies – past, present, and by all indications, future – guarantee failure. Rising body counts will proceed with little interruption and misspent billions will proceed with no interruption. The waste and futility likely will take their toll.

Where I differ with the eventuality theory, however, is in its exclusively forward-looking “eventual-ness.” For there exists a reasonable likelihood that the critical seeds of Mr. Bush’s political destruction already have been sown – and their fruit is inevitable.

What we’re seeing in public opinion polls may be the political equivalent of William F. Ogburn’s “cultural lag.” In his famous sociological theory of 1922, Ogburn purported that twentieth-century American thinking was battling technological change with nineteenth-century attitudes. These attitudes would – here we go – eventually catch up with, and reflect, known reality. There would take place some attitudinal breaking of the dam, and tensions would ease.

Presto the dialectic. Nevertheless, such a growing change of heart and mind would not be readily apparent in some modern version of opinion polls.

Similarly, the current attitudinal shift toward Bush is not readily apparent. He may be hanging in there for now – after all, he just let loose tens of millions in Kerry-bashing ads – but there’s no denying Bush has fallen from a near record-setting popularity apex and he’s not climbing back.

This slide appears inexorable, since the president’s misguided policies produced the slide and we can count on his bullheadedness to sustain it. A month or so from now, I submit, we’ll see a few more points whittled away from Bush’s approval rating – points already lost but not yet reflected – and an inversion of the Bush-Kerry rankings.

The opinion-lag effect is bad news for Bush. And we’ve six months to go till Election Day.