Two bits of good news.
Sometimes it's good to be wrong.
1) It doesn't look like the "30,000 body bags" are going to be filled afterall. According to the Christian Science Monitor, the Louisiana death toll stands at 579. It will go higher, but it's unlikely to be anything like the thousands we feared.
2) On the front page of Polling Report (which for some reason the folks at the conservative blog Polipundit have chosen to link today of all days), Bush's approval ratings have hit a new low in the CNN/Gallop poll. Kos (and an analysis by Survey USA) thinks it was last Thursday's Katrina speech, which further turned off conservatives with its big-government, throw-money-at-the-problem rhetoric without appeasing the mods and libs who, at some point, bought Bush's schtick for the last time. Maybe, more generally, it just reflects an electorate that is sick of messianistic disaster-and-response and doesn't want to be comforted or promised things anymore. Less soaring response; more quiet prevention.
I think my instincts were wrong on this. Watching Bush's speech, and reading others write about the inevitable TV-media response to it, I felt all fatalistic, like "here we go again". Comfy, fake words, the same ones Bush has always made it on. Bush used to be able to whip polls around with his speeches -- post-911; early in the Iraq conflict; at the Republican Convention in 2004; at his inaugurals. And he's actually better at speechifying now than he's ever been. If the public hated it, or didn't give a shit about it, as much as the Gallop poll suggests, that really might mean that it's the morning after the bender in America.
Even better news: A new Pew Poll also shows that voters -- every age group, both genders --are chomping the bit to vote the Dems into Congress in 2006. This is a long-term result; voters were saying the same thing in the summer of 2004 and the Dems lost the popular vote nationally at the House level in the 2004 election. But one thing that's especially interesting is, in addition to the strong Dem-leaning among independents, self-IDed Dems are much more devoted to voting the party line (96-3) than Repubs are to voting theirs (89-8). That's not a long-term trend but it's a welcome one.
Five years into an impossible presidency, one doesn't like to get too optimistic. But maybe, just maybe, this really is the beginning of the end of the Bush playbook.
1) It doesn't look like the "30,000 body bags" are going to be filled afterall. According to the Christian Science Monitor, the Louisiana death toll stands at 579. It will go higher, but it's unlikely to be anything like the thousands we feared.
2) On the front page of Polling Report (which for some reason the folks at the conservative blog Polipundit have chosen to link today of all days), Bush's approval ratings have hit a new low in the CNN/Gallop poll. Kos (and an analysis by Survey USA) thinks it was last Thursday's Katrina speech, which further turned off conservatives with its big-government, throw-money-at-the-problem rhetoric without appeasing the mods and libs who, at some point, bought Bush's schtick for the last time. Maybe, more generally, it just reflects an electorate that is sick of messianistic disaster-and-response and doesn't want to be comforted or promised things anymore. Less soaring response; more quiet prevention.
I think my instincts were wrong on this. Watching Bush's speech, and reading others write about the inevitable TV-media response to it, I felt all fatalistic, like "here we go again". Comfy, fake words, the same ones Bush has always made it on. Bush used to be able to whip polls around with his speeches -- post-911; early in the Iraq conflict; at the Republican Convention in 2004; at his inaugurals. And he's actually better at speechifying now than he's ever been. If the public hated it, or didn't give a shit about it, as much as the Gallop poll suggests, that really might mean that it's the morning after the bender in America.
Even better news: A new Pew Poll also shows that voters -- every age group, both genders --are chomping the bit to vote the Dems into Congress in 2006. This is a long-term result; voters were saying the same thing in the summer of 2004 and the Dems lost the popular vote nationally at the House level in the 2004 election. But one thing that's especially interesting is, in addition to the strong Dem-leaning among independents, self-IDed Dems are much more devoted to voting the party line (96-3) than Repubs are to voting theirs (89-8). That's not a long-term trend but it's a welcome one.
Five years into an impossible presidency, one doesn't like to get too optimistic. But maybe, just maybe, this really is the beginning of the end of the Bush playbook.
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