I Don't Approve

According to surveyusa.com, the average approval rating for the president lies at 37%. This is incredibly low compared to what it was but a few years ago after 9/11 - near 80%. With midterms right around the corner, the overarching factor that could contribute to the Democrats taking over the US House of Representatives even while a Republican president sits, is the approval ratings. In other words, the less people like the president, the less they like the corresponding candidates for office from his party. I referred to this in an earlier blog in which I discussed how challenger Ron Klein (D) was trying to frame the race against Clay Shaw (FL-R-22) around the policies of the president.

I didn't have that much time to get a comprehensive outlook on how the MSM is framing the ratings versus the bloggers, but I would say that the reason the approval ratings of the president are so low is not so much due to the coverage the press provides, since they are hardly fit the "public advocate" model proposed by Jan Leighley (pg. 10). But rather to the perceived the job the president himself is doing, especially his failure to respond effeciently to Hurricane Katrina.

It must be stated as well, that the current views on the Iraq war are of major significance to the drop in ratings. First off, as Gershkoff and Kushner point out, the American public hate wars in which they have to sacrifice many troops. And harping on what Mr. Aftergood presented to us a few weeks ago about how the US military didn't want the media to take pictures of the coffins of killed soldiers, the Bush administration is being driven deep down the tube for all these years of deception and cover up. The public are seeing now how the Bush administration has messed up.