President Bush's presidency is in free-fall. Recent poll numbers confirm it. Bush's job approval rating is at 39%. 68% of Americans now want the nation to move in a significantly different direction than President Bush, and 44% say that they have simply lost confidence in the President.
On almost every important issue - Hurricane Katrina, the war on terror, Iraq, the rising cost of gas - Bush's approval ratings are plummeting. Even on the issue of leadership, Bush's trump card, the polling numbers show rising doubts among the American public.
"Just nine months into his second term," John Kenneth White writes in a perceptive article in Pollingreport.com, "Bush's political capital is all but spent. If he were a bank, he'd have to declare bankruptcy...If this were a parliamentary system, there would be a vote of no confidence and a new election held."
But what some say may be the biggest free-fall in the history of polling is that President Bush's job approval rating among African-American's currently stands at 2% - this according to a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal Poll. While some may question the accuracy of the NBC polling data, rising discontent among African-American voters is nonetheless palpable.
A picture is worth a thousand words, and one event that is certainly contributing to current record levels of African-American disaffection with the Bush administration is Hurricane Katrina. The television and print media images of the forgotten left-behinds at the Superdome were those of the poor and mostly African-American. The public outcry was so palpable that even President Bush had to make reference to the unfinished business of combating racial inequality and poverty in America.
Hurricane Katrina rubbed away, at least for a moment, the scar tissue from a festering national wound - poverty and the growing economic divide - that afflicts the nation. Despite the notoriously short attention span of many Americans, the facts are incontrovertible: poverty is on the rise in the U.S. Last month, the U.S. Census Bureau released its annual report on poverty, income, and health insurance coverage. The report documents that poverty rose by 1.1 million people from 2003 to 2004.
Suffering born out of poverty found its perfect storm in New Orleans, where over two thirds of the city is black and poor and the average adult income in some parishes is under $8,000 a year. Even as Mayor Nagin makes a gallant attempt to coax those in the Katrina diaspora back to New Orleans, it is doubtful that all-and perhaps a significant portion of them-will ever return.
President Bush will not make it any easier for them to return. He has already breaking his promise to make the people of the Gulf region whole. Any type of public works program appears to be off the table in Congress. In its place President Bush and congressional leaders will most likely push a package of tax incentives to benefit companies and corporations that can hire workers below the prevailing wage rate. The Bechtels and the Halliburtons will profit handsomely. But many local and minority contractors, who are raising their voices in disapproval of no-bid federal contracts that bypass local companies and their workers, have already read the lay of the land and are justifiably unhappy.
How our nation chooses to deal with the poor, dispossessed, and displaced throughout the Gulf region will tell a lot about the true character of the United States. African-Americans have their doubts that the billions of dollars appropriated by Congress will benefit them. That in some part explains President Bush's 2% approval rating among African Americans.