Inside Washington's Headlines

by Ken Feltman

Can Bush stand one more bit of bad news?

‘I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.’ A disengaged President Bush said that to ABC's Diane Sawyer on September 1. Everything we need to know about the disintegration of the Bush presidency is in those few words.

When I wrote that (New Orleans will recover. What about Bush? - September 2005) about President Bush’s slow, bumbling response to Hurricane Katrina, I knew I would hear from many readers. I did. Most expressed feelings ranging from disappointment to outrage that I would criticize Bush, as if it is disloyal for a Republican to criticize a Republican president. Today, we know that virtually every expert who commented on the levees over the years warned that they might not hold. They didn’t.

My assessment of the president's situation was based on research from political focus groups. The opinions expressed in those focus groups turned out to be reliable predictors of national opinions. Today, with more recent focus group results - and even with the public's disenchantment with Bush's handling of Iraq - we can make further predictions.

As counter-intuitive as it seems, especially with the almost daily bad news for the Administration on several fronts, Bush is being buoyed by the public's perception that homeland security is the number one issue. Bush is helped because the Democrats lack credibility on national security issues. But Bush is on very thin ice with the American public. He needs to concentrate on the War on Terror and avoid any more embarrassing missteps like Katrina. Put in the words of one focus group participant, 'I want Bush on a pretty short leash.'

The president may not understand how short the leash is. The Administration’s inept handling of Katrina has made it easier - some might say necessary - for Congressional Republicans to distance themselves from Bush. The White House had come to expect obedience from Congressional Republicans. Times have changed. No longer do rank-and-file GOP senators and representatives fear White House retaliation. They fear voter retaliation.

Unreturned calls

The president has been handed a string of political and legislative defeats and delays. His ability to set an agenda for Congress is gone. His staff cannot call a recalcitrant member of Congress and cajole (or bludgeon) him back into line. How bad is it? Even the president can no longer expect his phone calls to Capitol Hill to be returned immediately.
 

A number of recent statements by Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean and Democratic House Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal.) have reinforced the impression that the Democrats cannot be trusted with national security. Dumb things that Democrats say will not help Bush recover. The emperor has no clothes and even if all the other people toss away their clothes, Bush is still naked. And like the fairy tale, where all the people (except one little boy who wasn’t shushed in time) were afraid to tell the emperor that he was naked, the White House staff has feared telling Bush. So Bush has paraded around, politically naked.

Get-tough policy

The Administration’s response to the drop in Bush’s approval rating was to adopt a get-tough-with-dissenters policy. Every Administration has its share of slow learners. This one is no exception. One White House lobbyist buttonholed a reluctant GOP senator and told him that his privileges and favors could be taken away if the senator did not get in line behind the president. The senator responded: ‘The voters can take away my job.’ Another White House staffer told a trade association president to get his members ‘off the president’s back’ on an issue of importance to the association’s members. The trade group’s next bulletin to members proclaimed: ‘We are having an impact at the White House! Keep the pressure on.’

A leading political indicator of a president’s popularity is the number of requests by members of Congress for campaign and fundraising appearances. Requests for Bush have dried up. Some Republican campaign consultants have advised their Congressional clients to point out their differences with Bush.
 

Over time, a picture emerges from political focus groups. In this case, we get a picture of an out-of-touch leader who surveyed Katrina’s devastation through a window of Air Force One. Many focus group participants attached special significance to the photo, saying that it validated concerns that Bush was unaware of what was happening and had no one around to give him the truth. Typical of many comments: ‘Didn’t anyone have the common sense or the courage to tell Bush that (the Air Force One photo-op) was a bad idea?’ After seeing that picture of Bush, no one doubted news reports that the White House staff had to put together a video of television reports about Katrina to get the president to understand the immensity of the human misery.

The disaffected middle

Suddenly, Bush was a man you might not want to have a beer with after all. Previously supportive focus group participants now called him aloof, arrogant, out of touch, uninvolved, uncaring, out of the loop, uninformed.

Was this a president who had worn out his welcome? You might have concluded that from public opinion polls, which measure public opinion differently from political focus groups. But a careful review of the Decision-Maker focus groups shows some good news for Bush. He retained his base. The right stuck with him, if less vocally. This is important because no president has been able to govern effectively, domestically or in foreign affairs, without the support of his base.

The left was never with Bush but is now more vocal in opposition. Gloating, some Democrats responded to Bush’s drop in the polls by assuming that they could increase their criticism of the president’s Iraq policy. They misread the public’s message to Bush. The disenchantment that caused the drop in the polls was more over Katrina and other domestic issues, less over the War on Terror. Despite everything thought to be going wrong in Iraq, participants were unwilling to abandon the president because they continue to believe that Republicans are better on national security. In fact, participants have not changed their impression of a year earlier: Democrats would not do a better job with the War on Terror.

Good news amidst the bad news

More good news for Bush: When asked, very few of the participants said that they would support Senator Kerry (or another Democrat) today. This is a dilemma that the Democrats must solve if they expect to win the White House in 2008. Obviously, Senator Hillary Clinton understands this and it explains her centrist position on the war, a position that is bringing her escalating criticism from the left. So despite Bush’s many domestic troubles, and a messy situation in Iraq, you can make a good argument that Bush would be reelected today - because the public does not trust the Democrats on the key issue of homeland security.

The voters in the middle are the key to Bush's dropping poll numbers. These centrists are beyond disappointment with Bush. They are disgusted. They are ashamed of their government’s response to Katrina. But that does not always translate into good news for Democrats. The hurricane triggered desertion by many centrist voters, but not by those centrists who voted for Bush in 2004. They would still vote for him. The Democratic alternative is not acceptable.

This was not a surprise to followers of Decision-Maker focus groups, which had shown for months that the president’s support among centrists was wide but only inch deep. He was what we call ‘one more bit of bad news’ away from plummeting in the polls. The Katrina catastrophe was several bits of bad news. That is why I wrote so confidently in September about the disintegration of the Bush presidency.

The centrists who still support Bush have a tough message for him. One man expressed it especially brutally: ‘We have you there to work on terrorism. Do that and don’t put cronies into positions where they can do embarrassing and criminal things and destroy places like New Orleans.’

The president was not helped when his staff began to attack anyone who disagreed with the Administration on the war as unpatriotic. That disgusted focus group participants even more. Some peeled off, expressing anger at the president. A few even quoted (or misquoted) Samuel Johnson: ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.’ That is potent criticism.

Has the White House figured out what Hillary seems to know?

Finally, the White House seemed to get the message. Senior staff debated a strategy to confront the peril. A dual approach was implemented: (1) critics would be answered with facts, not with appeals to unity or patriotism; and (2) the White House would disclose more about what was happening in the war. Less important than the strategy was the implicit admission that something was very wrong and needed changing.

Now, we will see whether the White House can implement this strategy. If so, and if the president keeps his concentration on the single issue that the public wants him to work on, then Bush's approval rating should move up in the newspaper and television polls. If we see Bush spending blocks of time on issues other than the war, we might expect to see his approval rating slip or stay the same.

We can draw some conclusions: The public is bitterly and emotionally divided on Bush. His moderate supporters have been silenced by his mistakes, especially with Katrina. Those in the middle who voted for Senator Kerry, but supported Bush on the war, are now more likely to line up against Bush on the war as well as on other issues. Centrists who voted for Bush are still with Bush, but not very happily. This is a president who is now one bit of bad news away from becoming perceived as an ineffective leader by the last group of centrists who continue to support him.

Participants were not asked if they would want Bush as president if the war were settled. That resolution, not the exploitation of Bush’s missteps, is what Democrats should hope for because it could signal a desire to turn things over to a Democrat to work on domestic issues (other than homeland security!). Future focus groups will explore this and other possibilities. No doubt Senator Clinton is exploring them right now. That explains her hawkish posture on the war.

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