Below The Beltway

As the most unpopular President in history:

WASHINGTON — President Bush has set a record he’d presumably prefer to avoid: the highest disapproval rating of any president in the 70-year history of the Gallup Poll.

In a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken Friday through Sunday, 28% of Americans approve of the job Bush is doing; 69% disapprove. The approval rating matches the low point of his presidency, and the disapproval sets a new high for any president since Franklin Roosevelt.

The previous record of 67% was reached by Harry Truman in January 1952, when the United States was enmeshed in the Korean War.

Bush’s rating has worsened amid “collapsing optimism about the economy,” says Charles Franklin, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies presidential approval. Record gas prices and a wave of home foreclosures have fueled voter angst.

Bush also holds the record for the other extreme: the highest approval rating of any president in Gallup’s history. In September 2001, in the days after the 9/11 attacks, Bush’s approval spiked to 90%. In another record, the percentage of Americans who say the invasion of Iraq was a mistake reached a new high, 63%, in the latest poll.

Assessments of Bush’s presidency are harsh. By 69%-27%, those polled say Bush’s tenure in general has been a failure, not a success

Frankly, I don’t see these numbers changing significantly before Bush leaves office. He’s hit with the double whammy of a faltering economy and an unpopular war, and it certainly doesn’t help that more than 3/4 of Americans think the country is on the wrong track.

And history’s assessment of Bush’s tenure is unlikely to be kind, either. At least initially, he will be viewed much like his father was; a President who, after an unprecedented threat to the American homeland had popularity ratings in the 90% range only to squander them chasing the idea of a stable, democratic Iraq, something that has never existed before and is unlikely to exist for some time to come. In the meantime, the government spending skyrocketed, civil liberties were curtailed in the name of “security” measures that are largely ineffective, and the nation’s reputation internationally was squandered after 9/11.

In the pantheon of Presidents, George W. Bush is more likely to be ranked with men like Ulysses S. Grant and Warren G. Harding, then anywhere close to the way things seemed in those days after September 11th.