Yesterday was President’s Day, and according to Zogby, a majority of Americans are looking forward to celebrating President’s Day, 2009, when Bush is a former President:
As America marks its official Presidents Day holiday, the nation’s likely voters appear to have settled on a somewhat negative appraisal of work done by the current occupant of the White House, a new nationwide Zogby International telephone poll shows.
After slight moves above and below the 40% job approval mark over the course of the past few months, that’s now the percentage of respondents who give him high marks for his leadership, while 60% said he deserves only fair to poor marks, the survey shows. As is usually the case, a similar percentage – 42% – said they believe the nation is moving in the right direction.
In all fairness, though, I hate it when they lump together fair and poor (“while 60% said he deserves only fair to poor marks”), because when I say something is fair, I don’t mean poor. I would be happy if I could honestly say that I felt every politician was doing a ‘fair’ (meaning average/passing) job.
Obligatory link to the Mystery Pollster, who discusses all this in much more detail.
neil
I think the significance of ‘fair’ is more that anyone who chose ‘fair’ has explicitly passed up ‘good’. In a vacuum, fair is not such a bad thing, but if ‘good’ is too strong a word for you, then it’s safe to say that you don’t approve.
Steve
As long as it’s apples to apples then it doesn’t really matter how you measure the numbers. The methodology used to derive the 40% number is the same as the methodology that said Bush had a 90% or whatever job approval rating shortly after 9/11. If most presidents have no trouble rating above 50% job approval, then it’s kinda lame to claim Bush’s rating of 40% is invalid because “it includes both fair and poor.” He’s being judged by the same measure that applies to everyone.
RSA
One obvious reason that “fair” is lumped with “poor”, if I understand things correctly, is that it’s a four point scale, so “fair” isn’t really a neutral point. If “good” and “excellent” were balanced by “poor” and “very poor”, then there’d be more justification for thinking of “fair” as “neither good nor bad”.
tbrosz
My antennae go up whenever a pollster doesn’t include the actual results for me to check out myself. I haven’t found the actual Zogby poll yet. Some do, some don’t. I don’t like the results “filtered” through a news story.
Pb
This is roughly in line with other approval polls, seeing as how the big daddy of them all recently put Bush at 39.51% approval (and 57.22% disapproval, 3.27% not sure).
Eural
Wow – I can’t wait to see the numbers tomorrow. On the way home from work I heard Sean Hannity actually criticizing Bush for his stand on the UAE port deal. When you start losing the Hannity base you’ve really really really reached rock bottom. The numbers this time next week might be single digits…
Richard 23
Next Sean will be asking why President Bush didn’t use the busses to evacuate New Orleans. Or maybe not.
Winston
I agree, “fair” covers a lot of ground. When pollsters usually use “only fair,” as Zogby did here, though, I’m not too uncomfortable with lumping that in with poor.
ppGaz
How could anyone look at the record of these sorry spuds and say “Yeah, they’re doin a fair job.”
Where? In Stupidville?
In Dumbshitland?
As a sidebar to Mass for Shut-ins?
Help a brother out here.
HH
This is why Zogby is consistently negative poll on Bush… it happened with Clinton too. The “fair/poor” merging just doesn’t make sense.
HH
FYI Bush had an 82% approval in Sep. ’01, also lower than most if not all polls at the time.
HH
Also is it now fair to say that Glenn Greenwald’s Von Hoffman award came faster than expected?
Pb
HH,
Er, yeah, Zogby is so out of whack that they’re about in line with all the other pollsters on this one. I’ll grant you that they do tend to trend a bit lower than the pack, but not nearly as badly as Rasmussen does at the high end.
Bruce Moomaw
As someone fascinated by polls, the assumption that Fair = Poor drives me nuts too. Judging from my comparison of various simultaneous polls, if you force people who say that So-And-So is doing a “fair” job to choose between “good” and “bad”, about 1/3 of them will pick “good”.
Rekha-Avijit
Happy President’s Day, President G. Bush.
BIRDZILLA
Yesterday was GEORGE WASHINGTONS BIRTHDAY MAKES YOU WANT TO CHOP DOWN A CHERRY TREE