Salon.com News | Bush's sinking popularity
Bush's sinking popularity
With his Social Security plan in a vegetative state and the Iraq war mired in chaos, the president's poll numbers are tanking. Is he pulling the Republican Party down with him?
By Farhad Manjoo
George W. Bush lost the 2000 presidential election by half a million votes and saw the result as a mandate to rewrite the tax code and redraw the map of the world. So when he won the 2004 election by 3 million votes, liberals could have been excused for wondering what the weather would be like in Vancouver for the next four years.
Bush's sinking popularity
With his Social Security plan in a vegetative state and the Iraq war mired in chaos, the president's poll numbers are tanking. Is he pulling the Republican Party down with him?
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By Farhad Manjoo
April 29, 2005 | George W. Bush lost the 2000 presidential election by half a million votes and saw the result as a mandate to rewrite the tax code and redraw the map of the world. So when he won the 2004 election by 3 million votes, liberals could have been excused for wondering what the weather would be like in Vancouver for the next four years.
Bush's second-term agenda was so unapologetically bold -- he wanted to privatize Social Security, flatten federal taxes, remake the courts and, on the side, democratize the world -- it bordered on the revolutionary. In November, as liberals were sunk in the delirium of defeat, their in boxes buzzing with comic maps dividing North America into the United States of Canada and Jesusland, it seemed that nothing could rein the Republican president in.
Six months later, Bush is the dog that didn't bite.