22%

by digby

He goes out with a whimper, not a bang:

President Bush will leave office as one of the most unpopular departing presidents in history, according to a new CBS News/New York Times poll showing Mr. Bush’s final approval rating at 22 percent.

Seventy-three percent say they disapprove of the way Mr. Bush has handled his job as president over the last eight years.

Mr. Bush’s final approval rating is the lowest final rating for an outgoing president since Gallup began asking about presidential approval more than 70 years ago.

The rating is far below the final ratings of recent two-term presidents Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, who both ended their terms with a 68 percent approval rating, according to CBS News polling.

Recent one term presidents also had higher ratings than Mr. Bush. His father George H.W. Bush had an end-of-term rating of 54 percent, while Jimmy Carter’s rating was 44 percent.

Truman’s was at 32% when he left office, which in Republican logic means that Bush will end up being much more popular than him over time.

And Cheney is at 13%. (As tristero would say, “who are those people?”)

I think what amazes me the most about this isn’t that Bush is unpopular, but that he was perceived as being “enormously popular” for so long. He was given a very generous honeymoon in 2001, particularly considering the circumstances in which he took office. And after 9/11, he was canonized in the mainstream media as a “great wartime leader.” Just yesterday I heard the gasbags trotting out the old saw that his performance after 9/11 was his finest hour.

(Whenever I look at footage from that day I just have to laugh that Bush and his cronies are actually making the case that the man under whose watch that happened is supposed to get some credit for not letting it happen again. It’s patented Bushian hubris.)

The media went nuts, as I’m sure you recall. That stupid bullhorn moment was turned into an iconic image and Bush was commonly referred to as being “enormously popular” (poll numbers notwithstanding) by the press well into his second term:

Matthews (4/11/05): “Let me ask you about this thing, about George Bush, George W. Bush. He’s been an amazingly popular president, much more popular than either of the guys who ran against him, obviously.”

(Except for that little matter of losing the popular vote in 2000 and the near electoral college defeat in 2004, anyway.)

Other than a few short months after 9/11, he was never as popular as the press painted him. And by building him up the way they did, they made his fall all the more embarrassing.

Media approval is just about the worst indicator of success there is. They are either giddy market analysts who pimp worthless stock to keep the bubble expanding until it finally explodes or petulant doomsayers nursing personal grudges and refusing to acknowledge success. Either way, they usually get in the way of the country’s ability to genuinely assess of their leaders.

If they hadn’t written that absurd hagiography of Bush the-great-wartime-leader, he probably wouldn’t have gotten a second term. And once that Bush bubble finally burst, it burst hard, and the slide has been steep and ugly.

He probably would have been better off historically if he’d gone down in 2004. God knows the country and the world would have been.

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