That Did A Fat Lot of Good

According to USA Today, President Bush's speech last week not only failed to bolster public opinion for his "new way" in Iraq, his poll numbers have gone down even further.

In a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken Friday through Sunday, more than 6 of 10 people back the idea of a non-binding congressional resolution expressing opposition to Bush's plan to commit an additional 21,500 U.S. troops to Iraq.

POLL RESULTS: New Iraq policy

However, those surveyed are split, 47%-50%, over whether Congress should deny funding for the additional troops.

The telephone poll of 1,003 adults nationwide has a margin of error of +/—3 percentage points. The results were compared with a survey taken before the speech, on Jan. 5-7, of a similar sample. The movement on several key questions was within the error margin and therefore not considered statistically significant.

That's not surprising, says Charles Franklin, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who studies polling.

"We've had four years to think about the war," Franklin says. "This is not him making a speech about a policy that the public hasn't been debating for a long time. … At this point, it's very hard for a speech to make much difference."

The White House is saying basically that they didn't expect the speech to change public opinion. "But as conditions improve in Iraq, so will the public's approval of the plan." Implicit in that is that the president's approval ratings -- currently in the 40's -- will go up, too (but not that he cares about that, right?). As Atrios notes, in 1998 when Bill Clinton's poll numbers were that low thanks to an oddly-phrased poll question by Gallup, the punditocracy was talking about an impending Clinton resignation.

MATTHEWS: Overnight, the polls--the Gallup poll, the most respected poll in the country, shows a 20-point drop in the president's personal approval rating, down from 60 percent to 40 percent. Big cut in personal approval, followed by, today, lots of noise on the Democratic side. The usual suspects, meaning Dan Quayle, Dan Coats and other Republicans, Mr. Ashcroft--Senator Ashcroft of Missouri, have called for his resignation. Perhaps no surprise there, but some very important Democrats, led by Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, have really shown their anger at what they perceive to be betrayal and deceit for six months, seven months now, of saying one thing and now turning it around and saying he wasn't telling the truth--by the president.

Bill Sammon, what's happening on the Hill?

Mr. BILL SAMMON (Washington Times): Well, I think you're starting to see more and more people talk about resignation. I think a--at this stage of the game, it seems somewhat extreme. But I think you have to remember in this scandal, things that started out seeming extreme have a way of, over a period of months, settling into the consciousness and becoming more of the norm.

If the same standards applied to Bush, they would have been talking about Bush's resignation back in May 2005.

It is a fatuous argument for the president to say that he doesn't care about the public's opinion of the war and it won't determine his conduct of the war. Obviously it does and it has; he wouldn't have fired Rumsfeld the day after the election -- or held off firing him until after the election -- if he didn't care about public opinion. I doubt that he would have made the speech last Wednesday night if he didn't hold out some hope of rallying the public behind him. So telling us that he doesn't care is just another layer of bullshit on top of the many layers he's already put down. The public has already moved on to looking for a way to get us out and we are not interested in the last desperations of a president who is trying to win us back.