This is not a shot at Bush - he's gone in a few months anyway - but a question for the Americans.
I think most people would agree that the US position is not great right now - stuck in two intractable wars and with an economy teetering on the precipice of recession or worse.
Are you surprised that 31% - nearly 100 million Americans (pretending that all are of voting age) - still think Bush is doing a fine job?
What would a sitting president have to do to get a lower approval rating? Truman was down to 22% in 1952 - I presume Korea and nuclear fears may have had something to do with that but I never realized he was so unpopular. Tricky Dicky hit 24% as a result of Watergate.
(Please, no 14 page posts in response complete with graphs, host - genuine opinions welcome, but the OP has no desire to read 14 pages of graphs and links)
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/03/19/bush.poll/
Quote:
Five years after he green-lighted the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, President Bush faced strikingly low approval ratings as he reaffirmed his commitment to "accept no outcome but victory" in the war.
A poll out Wednesday finds that 67 percent of those surveyed disapprove of President Bush.
Just 31 percent of Americans approve of how President Bush is handling his job, according to a poll released Wednesday, the anniversary of the start of the conflict in 2003.
Sixty-seven percent of those questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey disapprove of the president's performance.
The 31 percent approval number is a new low for Bush in CNN polling and is 40 points lower than the president's number at the start of the Iraq war.
"Bush's approval rating five years ago, at the start of the Iraq war, was 71 percent, and that 40-point drop is almost identical to the drop President Lyndon Johnson faced during the Vietnam War," CNN polling director Keating Holland said.
"Johnson's approval rating was 74 percent just before Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964, which effectively authorized the Vietnam War. Four years later, his approval was down to 35 percent, a 39-point drop that is statistically identical to what Bush has faced so far over the length of the Iraq war," he said.
Still, Bush's approval number is still better than the lowest number for his father, George H.W. Bush, who bottomed out at 29 percent in July 1992; Jimmy Carter, who fell to 28 percent in June 1979; Richard Nixon, at 24 percent in July and August 1974; and Harry Truman, who dipped to 22 percent in 1952.
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