by Tom Engelhardt
Published by Tom Dispatch
Two lines which not so long ago seemed firm as battlements -- places where a sign reading "Go no further" might well have been posted -- now seem drawn in the sand of an Iraqi desert. The first was, of course, that Florida 50% mark of an evenly divided nation of voters (quite different of course from a nation of Americans, who have, until the recent Democratic primaries, been deserting the voting booths in droves). Last year, the President's "approval" rating dropped close to the 50% mark and then held firm until the "Saddam bounce" in December drove it impressively upwards for a month.
At the end of January, however, in the space of a week his approval ratings plunged about 10 points, which in the strange world of serial polling, is a bit like an elevator dropping from an upper floor to the basement. In most polls, they plummeted, in fact, straight through the fast and firm Florida dividing line as if it had never been there and now have come to rest at perhaps 47% approval (even less in an electoral match-up with Sen. Kerry) in what is for this White House team terra incognita -- though it's territory that would be quite familiar to W's Dad. Given that Florida's about as far south as you can go in the U.S., it may not be accurate to say that Dick Cheney's vice-presidential numbers had already "gone south," but at perhaps a 20% approval level, he was already in Never-Never Land.
Why did this happen? The simplest and most compelling explanation I've found was in Associated Press piece that made the following link:
"President Bush's January decline in public opinion started soon after a top adviser on the search for weapons of mass destruction said he did not believe Iraq had large stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons, a tracking poll suggests."
http://progressivetrail.org/articles/040211Engelhardt.shtml