Given the statistics, 17% of the population supported Bush last year but now disapprove. That translates into about a third of his supporters bailing on him.
This question is directed towards that 17%. What has happened within the past year to make you no longer support Bush?
I still support Bush.
I think his fall is basically related to two things. Firstly, Bush is pretty much the only political issues even discussed in mainstream media today. The Democratic party has fallen off the face of the earth.
Secondly I think some people are starting to jump on the Iraq = failure bandwagon, which will eventually pass when people recognize how ludicrous that is. Plamegate also didn’t help.
Your premise is flawed.
I didn’t necessarily “approve” of Bush when I voted for him. I don’t “approve” of Bush today, but if I had the choice of voting for Bush or Kerry, I’d vote for Bush again today.
Approval ratings do not make a straight line comparison to what percentage of the vote a president might get. Bush could well have a low approval rating and still win another election against a weak opponent.
I think his fall is basically related to two things. Firstly, Bush is pretty much the only political issues even discussed in mainstream media today. The Democratic party has fallen off the face of the earth.
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Well, the Dems aren’t in power anymore so we can’t really do much on a national level except complain about the Republicans.
Want to bet on that? I’d wager on it being a failure. Of course, we’d have to have very clear definitions ahead of time as to what “success” is and set a time limit on the bet.
Well that post was bizarre due to your flawed use of the quote tags.
It’d be pointless for us to bet on the Iraq = a failure thing.
What do you define as a failure?
Here’s what I think happens with Iraq:
-After several years the existing Iraqi government has enough support that it can continue to function on it’s own, however there will be internal stability problems.
-The Iraqi military will be fairly active keeping the government stable, but there won’t be any widescale revolt, the government won’t collapse, totalitarianism will not come back.
-The United States will maintain a permanent military presence in the area. We’ll have established bases. Due to the fact that our military won’t be seen day-in-day out by the populace, much of the nationalist anger at being “occupied” will die down. Basically it will be the same situation we had with Saudi Arabia for many years. We’ll have bases there, but they won’t be visible enough to cause the constant attacks we have now. There will be political groups within Iraq that rant and rave about the cotinue American troop presence, but it won’t be a signficiantly huge risk to our soldiers lives.
-Iraq won’t be a country where people are mass murdered, put into rape rooms, summarily executed, or imprisoned for disagreeing with their government.
-Iraq will be a country where the citizens have some say in how their country is governed. Will it be a true Democracy? No, I don’t think so. I think it will not be a country as free as the United States or as free as Turkey. Democracy is hard, and that takes time. I think eventually Iraq will become like Turkey today, and then eventually it will be even better than that. But, Iraq hasn’t had any real freedom or non-arbitrary government anytime in recorded history. We’re working against many years of tradition here.
What do I think the big turning point will be? Eventually, once the Iraqi military has gotten to the point where they can handle most of the daily security needs, the insurgency will lose a LOT of strength. I think a huge strength of the insurgency is the fact that Iraqis are really uncomfortable with the idea of Americans walking their streets with guns. It’s an emasculating feeling to them as well as very contraty to Iraqi nationalism. Once this happens, insurgents will be fighting solely against other Iraqis, and the Iraqi population at large will be much less supportive of this.
Of course even right now, Iraq is pretty calm outside the Sunni areas. But much of the Sunni anger is born out of nationalistic feelings. The dislike for Shiites is something that will take a good while to solve, and I don’t know that we’ll ever have things perfect, but we won’t have the government collapsing or anything.
What are your predictions for Iraq?
Do you think the various ethnic and religious groups in Iraq will be able to really work together or will Iraq end up as a bunch of de facto autonomous enclaves, like the Kurdish region is now?
I predict that over the next 10 years at least there will be substantial turmoil and violent resistance from within the Sunni minority who feel and will continue to feel marginalized by the Shiite majority. The Sunnis almost universally opposed the ratification of the Constitution and will continue to oppose it strongly, some by violent means. We’ll probably see at least another thousand U.S soldiers die before we gain enough sense to cut and run.
Iraq will either split up into Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish autonomous regions, or face constant civil war. A “unified” Iraq is probably impossible unless it’s held together by an Iron Fisted ruler or artificially kept in place with United States help.
If our elections included a “None of the above” option, and the winning candidate had to beat out “None of the above” or the parties had to pick different candidates and start over… 
Hey, it worked in Iran (at least for a little while).
This makes a very poor assumption: That anyone who “disapproves” of the President’s handling of his job would not have voted for him last year. An election is not a measure of approval; it’s a contest between who you dislike least.
Does not compute.
I’d just like to add that I’m another voter who falls into this category. I’d answer a poll question saying I currently “disapprove” of the president. However, I’d still vote for him again if the alternative is John Kerry.
However, I can spell out some of the issues which have been disappointing to me in his second term:
Spending. I believed Bush to be a conservative in moderates clothing during his first term. His outspending of Clinton on welfare and social programs was just a polticial move to outflank his opponents on the left, or so I thought. In a second term, with no election to worry about, I assumed that Bush would get much more conservative and cut down spending. This hasn’t happened. The Republican congress and president are a dismal failure in this regard.
SCOTUS appointments. What’s the point of having a conservative president if you can’t get tried and true conservative appointments to the court? Maybe Harriet Miers would have been a competent, conservative judge. We had no proof of either. All of Bush’s picks so far seem to be more guided by politics than by an actual desire to stock the court with the best candidates. Even Alito, whom I think will be a great judge, seems to have been picked because the right forced him to, not because he actually wanted to do the right thing.
Bush’s failure on Social Security. This one’s only half a dissapointment, I guess. I do give him a lot of credit for trying. However, it’s still a disappointment. Privatization of all or part of Social Security was one of my best hopes for a second Bush term. Bush lost this fight, so it counts as a negative.
sorry for the hijack, but it astounds me that you can predict this so soon after the discovery of the torture room run by Iraq’s Interior Ministry.
And add to this how in November of '04, W was favored by 50+% of those who bothered to show up to vote which does NOT necesarily map out to the general population sample in the “approve/disapprove” poll, which probably includes a lot of people who disapproved so strongly, or cared so little, about the choice itself that they rather stayed home. (The taglinbe of “Polls of likely voters” doesn’t convince me)
[personal aside]Although WTH made Teresa’s hubby so much the greater of two evils vis-a-vis Laura’s old man, I can’t understand.[/pa]
My guess is there is a large proportion of the population, including perhaps you, who wouldn’t have voted for Bush against any Democrat that the Karl Rove machine had tarred. Maybe they would have voted for a different Republican and a few may have been pulled off by one of the most conservative Dems like Joe Lieberman. But this claim that Kerry was such a weak opponent is really sort of an excuse in my book. Jesus Christ himself would have looked bad after Rove got through with him.
I think you are setting the bar for Iraq
err, to continue:
Martin Hyde
I think you are both setting the bar extremely low for defining Iraq as a “success” and misdefining the question.
The issue with Iraq being a failure is about the process and events to date. Even if things calm down tomorrow it would be quite a stretch to say that the whole Iraq was a well-planned, competently executed operation.
Could I have a cite for the 34% approval rating?
Seems like so far this year, liberals have turned out to be right about just about everything. After years of denial and lies, yes, Cheney’s energy task force was all about oil executives, despite their denials of this in Congressional testimony. Yes, the Bush administration treated classified information as a gossip session to attack a political opponent. Yes they gamed the intelligence and mislead the American public. Yes, the Bush administration is so obbsessive about politics that they are clueless when it comes to domestic policy: hapless cronies replaced the professionals, and daily screw the pooch. Yes, there is no conservative sense of fiscal responsibility: just power to the pork. Yes, politics now has veto power over the findings of science. The latest defenses coming out of the administration are so patently absurd as to be insulting, and appear to exist purely to give their shrinking base of supports some catch phrases to yell back on cable TV… as long as they are still true enough believers to yell them without thinking.
Given all that, I have to guess that the people who would still vote for Bush are basically