Inventing a Bush comeback
April 30, 2010 10:24 am ET by Jamison Foser
Has any politician's imminent political rebound been (wrongly) foretold more often than George W. Bush's? Recall that throughout 2005, with Bush's approval ratings in free-fall, the media kept insisting he was just about to turn things around. He never did. David Broder, the dean of the Washington press corps, even predicted that Bush's handling of Hurricane Katrina would enhance his standing with the public. Oops. A year and a half later, Broder was at it again, writing that Bush was "poised for a political comeback." Didn't happen. And who could forget Chuck Todd's declaration that if Democrats took control of Congress in 2006, Bush's approval rating would hit 50 percent by the following July? Democrats did win Congress -- but Bush's approval rating barely cracked 30 percent the following July.
Now Yahoo! News and McClatchy have decided the time is once again ripe for George W. Bush to convince Americans he wasn't a complete disaster of a president after all. But in order to do so, they have to fudge a few things. Like this:
Oh, really? There's an "apparent shift in public opinion" of Bush? Let's just click through to the article and see what the evidence is:
Americans blame Bush more than they do Obama, by about 3-1, for the weak economy and the deficits, according to an ABC-Washington Post poll this week.
...
He left office with some of the lowest approval ratings in American history, and they've changed little since.
A CBS-New York Times poll this month, for example, found that 27 percent of Americans had favorable opinions of Bush and 58 percent had unfavorable opinions. That was essentially unchanged since the week he left office.
A CNN poll found him gaining 10 percentage points in his first year out of office; a Fox News poll found him losing 11 points.
Huh. That doesn't sound like much of a "shift in public opinion," does it? In fact, the only evidence in the article that such a shift is underway is -- wait for it -- Bush loyalists claiming a shift is underwaymore...
http://mediamatters.org/blog/201004300017