State of the what? Let’s see, 28%, 31%, 33%, 35%. That pretty much sums up the State of the President — or, at least, of his ever more dismal approval ratings in four of the latest major polls (and don’t even mention his state of approval in similar nose-diving polls abroad). Only two Presidents, on the eve of a State of the Union Address have ever scored lower–and one was Richard Nixon at 26%, seven months before he resigned his Presidency. (The other was Truman at 23% and mired in the Korean War.) Unbelievably enough, those aren’t even the worst figures around for this administration. Try 26%, 29%, 29%, 30%; that’s about how many Americans now think any presidential State of Iraq plan or strategy makes the slightest sense according to polls by Newsweek, CBS, the Washington Post/ABC News, and NBC/the Wall Street Journal. A little lower and you’re in the polling basement, the sort of place not normally accessible even to a bunker-busting President.
Basically, if the networks didn’t cut off all prime-time programming for the State of the Union Address, I suspect that the percentage of Americans bothering to listen to George W. Bush’s words might prove infinitesimal. After all, as the latest polls all essentially indicate, but Mark Murray wrote of the NBC/WSJ poll, “Nearly two-thirds of Americans appear to have given up on success in Iraq and also on [George Bush’s] presidency.”
In fact, we would undoubtedly do better to stop listening to any of the official words of this administration, since they bear next to no relationship to administration acts. This State of the Union Address, which will be analyzed to death in the press and on TV, matters not a whit. Never has an administration reached for its dictionaries faster or more often to redefine reality to fit its needs. Seldom has the media spent more time parsing (and then generally passing on) words that were meant to do little but promote fantasies, escape responsibility, and confuse the public. It’s the acts — all aggrandizing, all aimed at promoting the unfettered power of a President and Vice President who never learned the word “enough”–that matter and, wherever you look, they couldn’t be grimmer in our tattered, battered union.
If you want to read more about just one of the key issues that won’t be addressed tonight, turn to former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega’s latest piece, “Lying and Spying,” on how this administration has slipped and slid away from responsibility for its illegal National Security Agency surveillance program. Click here and scroll down.
