There's been some crowing over Bush's remarkable lift in the polls. The media's impressed, the right-o-sphere's atwitter, and Democrats are explaining it away. This is the big Bush comeback: only 6 out of 10 people don't like him!
A couple things:
• Without an obvious and routinely unraveling scandal, numbers in the 30's were basically unsustainable. Americans are predisposed to liking their president. Unlike the readers of, say, this blog, they don't want to believe the bad dude in the big chair with the cool office and the sweet jet is a total screwoff. Fair enough. So if Bush isn't really doing anything -- and at the moment, that appears to be the White House strategy -- approval ratings will drift back towards mediocrity, simply because overwhelming majorities of people aren't going to dislike the guy when he's cowering in a corner with his head down. Doesn't mean they'll like him, either, but there's not really a whole lot to disapprove of here.
• Take a look where Clinton's ratings were in 1994. Mid-to-high 40's, generally.
• The timing on all this is crucial. If we'd held the election in July or February, Kerry would have won. A variety of economic indicators, climatological happenstances, and international politics cycles tend to make November a fairly good time for incumbents. Take it back a few months and you'd have higher gas prices, take it forward a few and you'd face bitter winters and painful heating bills.
• The electoral worry for Democrats is that Bush troughs (can I use that as a verb?) too early. In the same way a candidate can peak too soon and find their momentum unsustainable, a candidate can hit rock bottom so far from the election he's got both plenty of time and motivation to change.
What you want is for Bush to limp along in a quasi-unpopular gray zone, not disliked enough to fade into the shadows but not popular enough to ride herd on his party. Then, when the election heats up, you try to tank the whole bunch. If he's too beaten before the election, the party will distance itself long before the voting starts. You don't want that: you want him in the mix, then you want to nationalize the election around Republican and administration scandals, and then you want to tie every conservative candidate in the country to their party's more recognizable mug shots and troubled leaders.
