Matt on the CBS poll:
58 percent disapprove of Bush's handling of the hurricane, and just 38 percent approve. But consider this -- only 20 percent say the federal government's handling of the disaster was adequate, while 77 percent say it wasn't. 24 percent say FEMA's response was adequate and 70 percent disagree. How is it, then, that Bush is rated so much better than the federal government he heads, and the disaster agency run by his appointee, the much-beloved "Brownie?" This is part-and-parcel of a very frightening cult of personality that's been erected around the person of George W. Bush ever since 9/11 with the effective complicity of the rightwing media.
He goes on to list a couple more instances where otherwise bright right-wingers seemed to lose their senses and rush to dump blame wherever Bush isn't in a desperate attempt to keep their honored leader morally pristine. The whole protocol reminds me of something a British Financial Times reporter said in "Journeys With George". When asked what's surprised him on the campaign trail he said, paraphrased, that:
I am simply shocked at how much Americans don't like politics. You walk into a room at 4am filled with screaming supporters and you ask them why they back this man and they don't give you a single policy, a single program, a single anything other than: "I like him. I think he's a great man."
That's reflected itself in polling in a rather interesting way. For the past couple of years, Americans have banished the Bush administration into the nether regions of public opinion on most every issue -- they don't like him on health care, on Iraq, on education, on the economy, on the environment, on much of anything. The only thing they do like him on is terrorism. Terrorism, of course, is the only policy initiative they've no effective way to evaluate. You can see how schools are doing, hear what teachers think, track your premiums, look up the number of uninsured, watch the news out of Iraq, and generally make judgments on what you see. Terrorism offers no similar benchmarks, the idea that a lack of domestic attacks matters is to say that we were doing great fighting terrorism on 9/10/2001. So, in the absence of any data that could make up their minds, they tend to assume Bush is doing a superb job on the most weighty issue of the day, even as they judge him a failure in every other aspect.
It is a cult of personality. Bush has managed to create a heuristic of himself that in no way accords to his policy performance, and what he's proven is that a good heuristic is significantly stronger than all but the most undeniable dose of reality. Americans know what they think of Bush on most issues, but till now, those judgments haven't infiltrated their general opinion of the man. Maybe that's changing. If the CBS Poll is to be believed, though, it's not changing that much.
