Yesterday, maryshelley posted in her LJ crowing about how Bush's approval rating was at 61%, and included a snarky and nonsensical statement about "the other 39%". Given the fact that these results defied every other national poll, I went looking for the souce of this claim, and found it: Talon News, which claims to be "your source for unbiased news coverage and no-spin reporting".

Ah. This must be why on their front page they describe MoveOn.org as a "Bush-bashing, liberal political interest group", and why their headlines include such examples of journalistic integrity as "'Hate Bush' Event to Feature Hollywood Elite, Liberal Activists" and "Dem Attack Dog Gephardt".

Given that it's impossible to take a site like that seriously, I went further digging for the source, and found that the story gets its numbers from the National Annenberg Election Survey's after-Thanksgiving report, detailing the polling bump Bush got from his layover in Baghdad.

Perhaps the reason why this 61% job approval sounds so suspect is because it's reflected nowhere else in any of the results, in this or any other poll. For example, this same poll reports that people think this country is on the wrong track by 51% to 41%--and this is despite the fact that the question was worded to weight people towards a positive response. Similarly, approval of the job the president is doing in Iraq (49% approve, 48% disapprove), whether it was worth going to war over (49% yes, 46% no), and his handling of the economy (50% approve, 48% disapprove) are a statistical tie.

So if the public is evenly split both on whether he's doing a good job in Iraq and on the economy, and a clear majority think the country is going in the wrong direction, just where /does/ the public think he's doing a good job?

There are other aspects of the NAES poll which are suspect, such as the question asking people to rate whether a given phrase applies to Bush, which includes six positive answers and only one negative, especially since its previous time period polled Bush higher than any other national poll except ABC/WaPo, which has a long and established track record of reporting the highest approval ratings for Bush, so far outside the national norm as to be beyond credibility.

It's undeniable that Bush took a bump in the polls after his Thanksgiving stunt--but even if you accept the numbers in the NAES poll, pointing to this as a measure of his public support is disingenuous at best. The facts on public record make it clear that this is an anomaly rather than a reflection of his support. Consider the following graphs, one of which shows Bush's approval ratings since he took office, and another which shows the approval ratings of a number of previous presidents across their terms.

Bush's father maintained a more or less steady level of approval throughout the first half of his presidency, but following the invasion of Panama took a sharp nosedive. The first Gulf War gave him another boost, but the postwar handling of the economy sunk his approval--and his presidency. Clinton not only maintained a positive approval rating, but in fact had a constant and consistent /upward/ trend--the spikes were generally downward when something bad happened or a scandal broke.

Bush, on the other hand, has a very steep and consistent decline in his approval rating the longer he goes without a major event, such as 9/11 or the Iraq war. It is notable that this trend has /never/ been upward, not even following 9/11 when his approval rating took a tremendous positive spike as the country rallied around their leader. Equally notable is the fact that his approval has yet to bottom out, suggesting that we have yet to see how low he can go.

The consistency and sharpness of this downward trend, which started when he took office and has never stopped, suggests that the longer the American public watches Bush's day-to-day governance of the country, the less they like what they see. It is only when he pulls stunts like his two-hour layover in Baghdad, or when something drastic happens to the entire country, that he takes a surge in the polls--after which his approval starts dropping right back down over time.

If you feel you need to point to briefly inflated poll numbers to justify your support for this indefensible man, by all means, feel free. But don't expect to be taken seriously.