John LeBoutillier
Monday, May 17, 2004

And this opinion is shared by all pollsters: Gallup, Pew, Fox News Dynamics, Rasmussen, NEWSWEEK and Zogby.

It is a general rule of politics that the incumbent's approval rating at the beginning of the year - or certainly six months before an election - is a pretty good predictor of his/her Election Day tally.

For example, recent Presidents who were re-elected -- Reagan & Clinton -- scored in the low 50's on their election year approval ratings. And both won that November. (Clinton only garnered 49 percent of the vote in a three-way race while Reagan scored a landslide win over Fritz Mondale.)

Recent presidents who lost - Carter & Bush I - had under-50 and deteriorating approval ratings by this time in their election cycles. Their end results? Carter was blown out by Ronald Reagan and Bush got a paltry 37 percent of the vote in November 1992, matching his May approval ratings.

So does this mean that yet another Bush is going down the drain in November?

Well, he is in Big Trouble.

His problems: 1. Iraq: it is deteriorating daily -- as signified this morning with the car-bombing assassination of the head of the Iraqi Governing Council in Baghdad. Every day brings more proof that the trend-lines are all downward in Iraq.

Furthermore, support at home for this occupation is slipping rapidly. The desire by many Americans "to just get out now" is growing stronger every day.

Every new revelation -- from the prison abuse scandal to the Nick Berg beheading -- just sickens Americans and makes them want the entire Iraq story to go away.

Team Bush has bet the ranch -- and the White House -- on Iraq. And right now they are losing the bet Big Time.

2. The perception that the economy is bad. Even though the economic data indicates that the economy is expanding, people don't agree. They are quite down these days. Why? A number of factors: increased state and local taxes, increased cost of health care, increased cost of college tuition, and more hours working to increase productivity (to make up for fewer workers).

So the data may say one thing, but the people another.

A reminder: in 1992 the economy came out of a recession yet then-President G.H.W. Bush lost because the voters perceived that things were still bad.

In politics, perception is reality.

3. Gas prices: this has become a major story -- and is directly related to Iraq and the economy as issues in this year's campaign.

As prices soar, it sours voters. And President Bush's inability to get the prices to go down may hurt him terribly in November. Rising gas prices act as a tax and cause almost all other prices to rise. Plus, it is related to the mess in the Middle East.

Conclusion: President Bush and his White House have totally lost control of the agenda. They control almost nothing that is happening; thus they are forced to react to events as they unfold.

There is more and more talk of an early pull-out of U.S. troops from Iraq. But that option would be a complete reversal of the Bush plan -- and the entire war effort would be seen as a failure. His own hard-line supporters would accuse him of "cutting and running."

Even a capture of Osama Bin Laden would not shift the debate back into Bush's favor. It would be a major success but not enough to offset everything else.

So Bush has made his bed. Now he has to sleep in it -- and hope that Iraq and the economy change for the better in the next few months.

If they don't, he will follow his father back to Texas as one-term presidents who squandered huge post-war approval ratings and lost to left-wing liberals in a conservative country.