[Mb-civic] It's No Holiday for Bush - E. J. Dionne - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

It's No Holiday for Bush

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Tuesday, August 9, 2005; Page A17

President Bush has survived summers of discontent before. But this 
season's doldrums -- reflected in dismal poll numbers and a surprisingly 
weak Republican showing in a special Ohio congressional election -- will 
be harder to surmount. They are the culmination of doubts about Bush 
that have germinated below the surface of public opinion for much of his 
presidency.

Typical of the polls was a Newsweek survey released over the weekend. It 
showed Bush with a 42 percent approval rating, matching the lowest of 
his presidency. Only 34 percent approved of his handling of the war in 
Iraq. A remarkable 61 percent disapproved.

The race in Ohio, where Democrat Paul Hackett, an Iraq war veteran, 
managed 48 percent of the vote in a district Bush carried with 64 
percent last year, has Republicans scrambling for alibis. Many in the 
party are ascribing the narrowness of former state representative Jean 
Schmidt's victory to flaws in her campaign and her candidacy. The search 
for a scapegoat is the surest sign that the GOP knows something is badly 
wrong.

<>Bush's obvious problem is Iraq. The sharp rise in casualties over the 
past fortnight has pushed the war back onto the television news and 
aggravated opposition. Less noticed is that from its inception, this war 
was never broadly popular. The president also had a difficult summer in 
2002 when he began selling the war. One Republican politician after 
another returned from that summer's recess reporting, in the popular 
phrase of the time, that the president had not yet "made the case" for war.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/08/AR2005080801145.html?nav=hcmodule 

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