All the way back to 2002 and 2004, the issue of security and terrorism was supposed to be the strength that drives Republican victories and generally has been the strongest suit of the president. Now they don't have a strong suit to play. |
For the peace activists, they are good, symbolic results. They can use them to impress people with how widespread opposition is. But they're misleading as far as aggregate public opinion. It's an April election, which has very low turnout. So as a public opinion specialist, I have to point out how unrepresentative highly motivated voters are in an April election. |
How tragic it is. How none of us would ever have seen this happening to someone that we know and that is so lovable. |
I bet that really did stimulate contributions a lot. The censure resolution, and lack of any other Democrat backing it, really put a lot of Bush-haters onto Feingold. |
If I were in the White House, I would be pretty pleased about this. |
If I were in the White House, I would be pretty pleased about this. It does suggest pretty strongly that the president has the opportunity to drive public opinion on this. |
It takes a lot more than one day of good news or two days of good news to turn polls around. It doesn't take much bad news to keep the polls down. You keeping getting hit. |
Our attention span is simply shorter. Our willingness to put up with a difficult military situation and losses isn't what it used to be. |
Presidents who are low in the polls have a hard time getting Congress to go along with them. He has to persuade the people in Congress to follow his legislative agenda and they're all worried about 2006. |
The base is his last refuge at this point. |
This is doing Feingold a lot more good than you would have thought based on the reaction he got in Congress. Democrats were running like crazy to get away from it. But it's a great strategy for Feingold because it really helps him out in building a base of intense partisans. |
This is someone who has staked his presidency on strong leadership through crises, and now he has faced three major challenges. Sept. 11 fundamentally altered what this administration is going to be remembered for, which is the response to terrorism, the Iraq war and now obviously Katrina and the aftermath. |
This war, as bad as it is, touches a far smaller percentage of the population than Vietnam did. |