Polls Show Bush Still Drifting

Although his numbers are still in seriously negative territory, the good news for Bush is that he's gotten a slight upward bump in the polls because of his support for Israel, but the longer Israel hammers Lebanon and the greater chance there is of an expanding war, the more Bush's numbers are likely to drop once again.

Here's an excerpt from the Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll (hat tip to The Left Coaster):

Almost 3 out of 5 Americans disapprove of the way Bush is handling the economy, the poll shows. Economic growth is forecast to slow to an annual pace of less than 3 percent in the second half of this year, from an average of about 4 percent in the first half, according to a Bloomberg survey of economists.

The 56-month expansion is the fourth-longest since World War II. The economy has generated 5.4 million new jobs since June 2003, and the unemployment rate has dropped to 4.6 percent, a level economists consider full employment.

Yet many Americans remain unimpressed, the poll shows.

(snip)

``Bush could be doing a better job,'' said Meredith Rice of Choctaw, Oklahoma. The 34 year-old patient services representative, who considers herself an independent voter, points to gasoline prices and the cost of the war in Iraq. ``Bush is letting things here slip,'' said Rice, one of several poll respondents contacted for a follow-up interview.

More than twice as many Americans think things in the U.S. are seriously off on the wrong track as those who say they are going in the right direction. A third of Republicans say the country is on the wrong track.

If history is any guide, I suspect we have returned to the Republican economics of the 1920s when corporate profits and the stock market suggested the economy was doing very well; but that rosy picture ignored what was happening to a large percentage of the American people at the time. Today, wages are stagnant, energy bills and health care costs are up, high paying jobs are not as abundant as they were in the 1990s. The list goes on. We have a president so focused on helping the wealthy that he has left most of America behind. And he has a foreign policy that makes sense to fewer and fewer Americans.