Kevin Drum opines about the increasing hemmorhage of conservative voters away from Bush. This is an unsurprising trend--I've written about Bush's declining approval ratings before, and recent polling patterns do seem to support my contention that the more Americans see of Bush's day-to-day governing, the less they like him--and that it takes exceptional events, like 9/11 or Saddam's capture, to give him a temporary bump in the polls. I think we have yet to see what Bush's baseline support is, and I'm betting it's in the 40s at best.

Bush's re-election numbers are in free-fall. The more informed Americans get about Bush, the less inclined they are to give him another four years. As far as I can tell, the people who still support Bush for re-election tend to fall into three categories:

1) Those who are informed and realize, on some level, that the Bush administration is too incompetent to run this country and is enacting policies that are detrimental to it in the long term, but are either too dishonest or too selfish to kick "their" party out of office. The best we can hope for from these people is that they'll be so disgusted with Bush's betrayals on issues important to them that they'll stay home on election day--but most of them will probably pull the lever just to keep a Republican in office.

2) Those who are simply uninformed--whether from stupidity, lack of opportunity, willful ignorance, or because they reject sources of input that challenge their beliefs. These people are sometimes reachable--but it's going to take the right blunder by Bush, or combination thereof, to do it. He keeps piling them on, so there's hope yet.

3) Those who think the so-called "War on Terror" trumps all other issues, and that Bush is the best man to prosecute this struggle. Some of them are of the xenophobic, France-bashing, hawkish bent, and these are simply not worth spending your time on. They cannot be reached, because all of Bush's "diplomatic" traits which we see as catastrophic, they see as laudable. Some of them, like Michael Totten, are latter-day converts to hawkish foreign policy, and /can/ be swayed--if they can be convincingly shown that a Democrat can protect America better than Bush.