A job approval rating of 30% for President Bush is the lowest he has ever recorded in the Zogby poll, the previous benchmark having been 31% in early June. Shortly before the midterm elections, he stood at 36%.
Zogby is an outlier among December polls:
Newsweek 32%
CNN 37%
Fox/Opinion Dynamics 38%
AP/Ipsos 33%
Rasmussen, which does daily tracking of Bush’s job approval, shows the president at 38%. While this may look good by comparison, it represents a four-point drop in a four-day span from December 6 to December 10.
Other interesting results from Rasmussen:
–43% of respondents said that they would never vote for a Mormon as president. That is an astonishing number. This may be a case where automated polls have the advantage over live questioning. There is a natural reluctance to avoid showing racial or religious bias to a real person.
–64% of respondents said they wanted to remove almost all troops from Iraq.
The Baker report has been a bonanza for the Democrats. They don’t have to say a critical word about the Republicans. As the New York Times notes today, the report lays bare the fault lines within the Republican party between the neoconservatives, who believe in enlisting American military power to serve the cause of spreading democracy, and the realists, who believe that it isn’t working. When William Kristol, the New York Post, and Rick Santorum are assailing the president’s own study commission, and the president himself is objecting to some of its recommendations, the Democrats can go about their business and leave the headline-making to Republicans. There’s an old political rule about this: Never interrupt a suicide.
