Bush's Troubles

It is not great secret that Bush’s approval ratings continue to drop every day and in virtually every area. For conservatives, the blame lay with the so-called “MSM,” or “mainstream media,” which supposedly are turning the nation against Bush. For liberals, the problems lay with his incompetent policies and the debacle of Iraq (guess which one I subscribe to).

One thing is for certain however and that is Bush is no leader and this fact has nothing to do with Iraq or really his policies (not directly anyway). No, the problem with Bush is that he simply does not care about the half of the nation that did not vote for him, and it has shown from day one. The polls reflect his polarization. As of early November (they have gotten worse since then), almost 8 in 10 Republicans support Bush, while just 11% of Democrats do. The problem for Bush is that along with the defections of moderate Republicans, among independents, his approval has plummeted. In the latest poll, only 33% of independents approved of his performance, while 66% disapproved.

The real problem with Bush, says William Galston, a professor at the University of Maryland, is that he is "the most partisan president in modern American history” and “as a result, voters in both parties are focusing on him, rather than on the specifics of the policies.”

According to Galston, Bush bears principal responsibility for that condition, saying that on three occasions he passed up opportunities to govern from the center and work more constructively with the Democrats and instead chose a path designed to mobilize conservatives.

• The first came after the disputed election of 2000, in the early days of Bush's new administration, when he pushed through an ultra-conservative agenda and essentially ignored those few areas of bipartisan support.
• The second came after the Sept. 11 attacks, when Bush's approval rating rose to 90 percent. Instead of uniting the country and practising what he preached about how 9/11 "changed everything," he instead simply went about implimenting his 9/10 conservative agenda with the national unity of 9/11 as a cover.
• The third came after the hard-fought and polarizing election last year.

“While White House aides can provide familiar talking points on gestures of cooperation across party lines, the fact of the matter is on all three occasions, the principal thrust of Bush's policies was toward polarization rather than conciliation. We are now living in the shadow of nearly five years in which that has been the dominant political message coming out of the White House.”

Galston is not alone in expressing such sentiments. In this week’s issue of Newsweek, David Gergen, Republican advisor to Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and (famously) Clinton, accused Bush of making “one policy blunder after another while marginalizing moderates in its own party and riding roughshod over members of the opposition.”

Gergen goes on to note something Republicans have simply forgotten: “we elect someone to serve as president of all the people--not half the people. Our best leaders have always understood that it is important to strike a balance, sticking to key principles while reaching out and working with those not of their particular persuasion.”

Bill Clinton, in sharp contrast, was a national leader (even if Republicans tried to humiliate him with sordid details of his affair) and the polls showed it. In December of 1998, after two articles of impeachment were brought against him, Clinton had an approval rating of 73%, over twice Bush’s current ratings, and higher than Reagan's ever got. Perhaps most remarkable by today’s standards is that approval for Clinton among Republicans was almost 40%, or almost 4 times the number of Democrats who today feel the same about Bush!

How did Clinton do it? By refusing to govern as a left-wing liberal and instead governed as a man of principled compromise. He appointed Republicans to high-ranking positions and reached out through rhetoric as well as policy, all the while being accused of lacking conviction (those who make such charges would do well to remember that this so-called “opportunist” shut down the government rather than sign an unfair Republican budget).

But of course Bush is no Clinton. He treats Democrats with contempt and believes that winning an election because of the Supreme Court and winning another with the narrowest margin of victory for a sitting president since Woodrow Wilson in 1916- gave him a political mandate to destroy Social Security, balloon the budget deficit, and push through tax cuts for the rich regardless of their negative effects on the American economy. In the meantime, he invaded another nation with hyped-up charges of gloom and doom and destroyed all of the international goodwill that could have done so much to fight terrorism after 9/11.

For Bush then, the real solution to his current predicament is NOT (as he so often has done in the past) simply accuse his opponents of treason and partisanship. This may have worked when the country was still in shock after 9/11, but not today. The solution is also not to simply continue pretending that everything is going as planned in Iraq in the face of all of the facts.

No, the solution to this predicament is to do what I personally believe this man to be simply incapable of doing, and that is to reach out to Democrats and moderate Republicans and begin proposing policies that can be attractive to the vast majority of Americans that are neither right-wing evangelicals nor left-wing liberals. If Bush decides to pursue such a course, I will be ready to listen.