"Bush puts people in jobs who don't know what they're doing," said Shirley Carignan, a retiree and a political independent from Weymouth, Mass.
"I think he's picking friends for these jobs. My girlfriend raises Arabians. You know horses, so what? Horses and people are different things."The number of people who think the country is on the wrong track grew from 59 percent last month to 65 percent this month. Tumbling consumer confidence after Hurricane Katrina may be contributing to that sense of pessimism.
The RBC CASH Index, based on polling by Ipsos, showed that consumer confidence sank in September to the lowest level since early March 2003 before the start of the Iraq war. Economic woes and a continuing war in Iraq have been complicated by the continuing hurricane recovery crisis.
"A lot of Americans don't pay attention to their leaders on a day-to-day basis," said Robert Blendon, a public opinion analyst at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "They measure presidents, governors and mayors on how they handle big events like a hurricane. This event is not over because the bodies are going to be discovered day by day."
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