George Bush in so much trouble with the American people that he looks to be almost politically dead. Approval ratings hover around 40 percent, which is the near-equivalent of political brain death. And even in a White House full of people who do not read polls, those numbers must make it difficult to get up every day to fight for freedom, a word the president used 17 times in his State of the Union address. But now is the time for Democrats to be careful.
America loves an underdog, and if Bush's stock keeps falling, the backlash of 2006 may not be the one that returns Democrats to control of the Congress but one that turns Bush into a comeback kid. He can be extraordinarily effective when expectations are sufficiently low: He is, after all, a two-term president who a lot of people thought couldn't, and didn't, get elected. And with nothing to lose he may, in his own odd way, decide to start making sense.
“America is addicted to oil,” he proclaimed this week.
Where did that come from?
For all its banality, the notion that the United States is “addicted to oil” sounds a lot like a new idea when it comes from Bush. For some time now, no one was listening to the president. Instead, he was dismissed as too arrogant, too self-serving, too removed from reality. But if the inflexible, un-persuadable, all-knowing 43rd president suddenly starts exhibiting signs of learning and listening, Americans may feel inclined to give him a hearing.
The poor job-approval ratings seem to have injected some humility. The sudden outbreak of modesty evident in Bush's State of the Union proposals will be reprised again next week when he sends his 2007 budget proposal to Congress.
Gleeful Democrats will beat up on the budget, showing the harm it will do to poor people and how much deeper we'll all fall into the deficit hole. They will look at the polls, watch as Hill Republicans squirm during the ethics scandals, and count down the days to the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November.
After all, a majority of voters, 54 percent, said they planned to vote Democratic in the House election this fall. Republican support came in at 38 percent, and 51 percent said they trusted Democrats more than Republican to deal with the big problems facing the country. That number has not been above 50 percent for Democrats since 1992, and they also have a little history on their side: Midterms in the second term of re-elected presidents tend to be disasters for the chief executive's party. Republicans lost in 1958, 1974, and 1986; and Democrats lost in 1966, the sixth year of the Kennedy/Johnson administration.
There is learning in the Democratic pickup of 1998: Bill Clinton was a victim and an underdog during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and Americans punished the bullies. So Democrats need to watch out for the presidential self-reinvention.
The change in tone could be the beginning of the transformation. If Bush, the oilman from Texas, is talking about ethanol and solar and wind power, don't be surprised if, at some point, the stay-the-course president begins to loudly proclaim the need to bring the troops home.
And if Democrats are not careful, Election Day 2006 could end up looking an awful lot like the disappointments of 2004, 2002, and 2000.
At some point, the photographs of Bush with convicted felon Jack Abramoff will be as hot as those of Brad and Angelina and will land on the front pages of many newspapers. And this week federal prosecutors in Texas began laying out their case against another Bush pal and moneyman, Ken Lay, the former CEO of Enron. It is hard to figure out how much, if any, further damage these events will inflict on Bush's hobbled presidency.But the Enron case does remind us that when that story broke in 2002, it was supposed to hurt the president and the GOP's chances at the polls that fall. Instead, they picked up four Senate seats.
Fear the Texan.
Terence Samuel is a political writer in Washington, D.C.
