Americans Increasingly Reject Bush. Are Hard Times And Absurd Lies Finally Getting Through?

With George Bush’s Approval Rating Now At The Lowest Level Of Any Incumbent President Since World War II, Are The Hard Times And Absurd Lies Finally Getting Through To Americans?

by Martin Graham

On the weekend prior to the November elections, I moved. One of the movers who packed up my goods felt obliged to offer me some political insight. "Don’t get me wrong," he explained, "I don’t care for either of these guys, but you just don’t change presidents in the middle of a war."

Since I didn’t want my belongings rerouted to the city dump, I politely agreed. But it did occur to me to tell him a few things about leadership in time of war. For one, Abe Lincoln had no problem firing his field generals left and right during the Civil War — until he found someone he valued, Ulysses S. Grant.

In World War II Winston Churchill disposed of numerous generals and admirals he felt had failed to perform. And during the Korean War, President Harry Truman fired General Douglas Macarthur, one of the country’s most popular military figures. I also wanted to point out to my mover friend that if everyone used his logic, a president could deliberately start a war just to get re-elected.

I shared this last thought with my daughter who was helping me move. She suggested wisely that I forget the whole matter, claiming that the poor fellow obviously had the now well-documented “Bush-voter syndrome” — namely the IQ of a radish.

Radishes, the American variety anyway, seem able to listen fine even when they are unable to think. According to John Kerry, using a source that slips my elephant mind, 77 percent of those Americans who voted for George Bush continue to believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attack. Why not? For someone listening to Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, when not moving furniture, this is a logical conclusion.

America has always been a rather de-politicized country. We became a country because we didn’t’ like the politics, the politics of King George. We prospered as a nation not because of politics but because of an abundance of natural resources and a strong willingness to work hard and long. Ingrained in our national character, Americans remain rather de-politicized, with the lowest percentage of voter turnout in the developed word.

It is the convergence of the “Foxification” of our national media with the traditional American contempt for politics that have our citizens barely paying attention to the facts and shunning all serious inquiry and has made us both the laughing stock of the world and the most despised nation on the planet. We’ve had low points in our history when ignorance and hypocrisy reigned shamefully supreme, but this was mostly during the pre-modern era when education was a luxury and information was truly scarce. That is not the situation today. Our only excuse today is that as a nation, we are willfully stupid.

Chalmers Johnson, President of the Japan Policy Research Institute and a distinguished social scientist, summarized it well recently in an article in In These Times:

“The phrase ‘to cross the Rubicon’ has been a metaphor for starting on a course of action from which there is no turning back...I believe that on November 2, 2004, the United States crossed its own Rubicon. Until last year’s presidential election, ordinary citizens could claim that our foreign policy, including the invasion of Iraq, was George Bush’s doing and that we had not voted for him. In 2000, Bush lost the popular vote and was appointed president by the Supreme Court. In 2004, he garnered 3.5 million more votes than John Kerry. The result is that Bush’s war changed into America’s war, and his conduct of international relations became our own.”

But keep in mind that nearly half of American voters rejected George Bush, and now there are signs that Americans’ displeasure with Bush is beginning to rise. A Gallup poll released this week shows that George Bush’s approval rating has plunged to the lowest level of any incumbent president since World War II at this point in his second term. Bush’s current rating is 45 percent; the next lowest President at this point was Ronald Reagan with 56 percent. Reagan’s low rating is still 11 points higher than Bush’s.

Although 45 percent of Americans polled say they support George Bush, five months ago candidate George Bush won 51 percent of the popular vote. In five months, then, millions of Americans have moved from voting for George Bush to not supporting him. Who are these Americans? Is one of them my mover? Maybe his thoughts on the war have changed as the number of Americans killed in Iraq has climbed past 1500. Is the price now too high? What’s a life worth? Maybe he wants an exit strategy that the Bush Administration seems unable to find? Maybe his moving job is not so secure, moving becoming increasingly expensive for a public increasingly squeezed for money in a sagging economy. There is talk of the return of inflation. You can bet movers have noticed the dramatic rise in the price of gasoline, with high prices now predicted to continue through 2006.

Maybe Fox News and Rush Limbaugh don’t sound so smart today. Maybe it’s true, as many have seriously suggested, that George Bush really is, beyond any doubt, the single worst president in American history.

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