Bush Presidency Near Death

The Macon Telegraph carries an interesting story about the near terminal condition of the Bush Presidency. Here are some excerpts, but the whole thing is worth a read.

Conservatives' mission: save Bush presidency

BY DICK POLMAN
Knight Ridder Newspapers

Let's put it in Texas terms: President Bush is trying to blast his way out of Credibility Gap.

He is plummeting in the polls, with still no indication that he has hit bottom. A solid majority of Americans now give him the lowest approval ratings since Richard Nixon - a verdict that seemed unimaginable when he was reelected one year ago - and, even more ominously, he is now judged by the majority to be an untrustworthy leader who lured the nation into war on false pretenses.

So it's no surprise that the Bush administration is in campaign mode,

(snip)

He promised that he would "restore honesty" to the White House; yet today, nearly six in 10 Americans tell pollsters that Bush is untrustworthy.

It may be too late for Bush to win them [the independents] back... according to pollster John Zogby, only 28 percent now side with the president.

Zogby said by phone: "Trust is like virginity. Once you've lost it, you don't get it back. That's what happened to Lyndon Johnson during Vietnam, and Nixon during Watergate. And Bush doesn't have much wiggle room to improve his status anyway, because, at this point, half the nation already hates his guts."

...

Given all this restiveness about Bush, it's debatable whether he can win back the American majority by shifting the focus to his critics - and assailing them as weak-kneed opportunists who are endangering the troops.

...

It's also debatable whether Cheney is the ideal person to employ this tactic... Cheney is the guy who repeatedly insisted that Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta had met in Prague with an agent for Saddam Hussein - even though the Czechs, the CIA and the FBI told the White House, long before the war, that no such meeting had occurred; in 2004, Cheney denied on CBS that he had ever described the Atta story as "pretty well confirmed" - even though he was captured on tape by NBC using those exact words in 2001. And Cheney maintained in 2002 that there was "irrefutable evidence" of an Iraqi nuclear program, even though, long before the war, the Energy and State Departments had concluded otherwise.