Gas goes up; Bush goes down

Former Clinton aide Bruce Reed, blogging for Slate, makes some hay earlier this week about the latest polling data on President Bush. Reed writes, "George W. Bush still has 41 months to turn the rest of the country against him. In the past 41 months, he has cut his popularity by 40 points - from 80 percent to 40 percent. At that rate, he's on track to set a record for presidential approval that could never be broken: zero."

The latest Gallup Organization poll shows Bush's approval rating at 40 percent - a new low.

Gallup says, "Bush's August average rating is the lowest for any re-elected president since World War II at a similar point after their re-election, with the exception of Richard Nixon. Only 34% of Americans are satisfied with the way things are going in the United States today -- the lowest satisfaction rating since January 1996."

Meanwhile, according to Gallup's late June polling showed the president with a 53 percent disapproval rating. That's one point shy of favorite conservative bugbear Bill Clinton's all-time high disapproval rating of 54 percent in pre-Monica September 1994.

Don't count the president out just yet...he garnered his highest approval ratings in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Now Hurricane Katrina offers him another disaster to lead the nation out of...I'm confident in my sarcasm that we'll see the president rise to the occasion again, perhaps this time calling for a global war on the weather.

Hitting Bottom [Slate]