the 'new york times' - on gwb, page-23

re: the 'new york times' - on gwb/rotor Looks like your in the minority rotor

First the polls turn on Bush -- now it's his own people
Tuesday, November 15, 2005 - 12:05 AM
You can quote all the opinion polls you want on George W. Bush's plummeting popularity ratings and they won't mean a thing because he doesn't need to get re-elected. But his Republican colleagues on Capitol Hill do, and right now, they don't want a bar of their president.

The most damning line comes from J.D. Hayworth, a big, bluff, hard right-wing Republican from Arizona, who was asked if he wanted Bush by his side when he campaigned for re-election next year. "In a word, no," he said.

Yesterday, the Republican candidate in last week's election for the governorship of New Jersey, also blamed Bush for helping him lose a race he should have run.

It's not so much that Bush's job approval ratings are low but that the polls show something far more corrosive to his presidency and his party -- Americans no longer trust him; they think he is a liar. Fifty-five percent of Americans now believe he "deliberately misled" them when arguing the case for the Iraq War.

And when the magnitude of the lie dawns on them, Americans, like all democratic citizens, react in the most natural way: they take a quiet revenge at the ballot box. After the scandal of Watergate broke throughout 1973 and 1974, which ultimately saw Richard Nixon named as an unindicted co-conspirator and then resign, there was a major backlash against the Republicans on Capitol Hill, and wave of Democratic reformers entered the congress.

There is a growing consensus that Bush's current troubles portend a similar trend in next year's mid-term elections. Last week's off-year elections, which not only saw the Democrats win in New Jersey but also retain comfortably the governorship of usually conservative Virginia are a curtain-raiser to the Bush agonistes.

Posted by Andrew West at November 15, 2005 12:05 AM