Dan Froomkin: The Most Disappointing President

The Most Disappointing President: No president in recent history has let the American people down the way this president has. In the past six and a half years, the public's view of President Bush has gone from one extreme to another. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a record-breaking 90 percent of Americans approved of the job Bush was doing, according to the Gallup Poll. Now, Gallup reports that a record-breaking 69 percent of Americans disapprove of his work in office. The same number call his presidency a failure.

Pundits focused so intently on the race to replace him risk losing sight of just how unhappy the American people are with Bush, how dismally they regard his tenure, and how eager they are to set off in a new direction. But Bush's decline and fall may be the dominant political story of our time -- and one that will certainly be on the minds of the American people as they head to the polls in November.

By the Numbers

Susan Page writes in USA Today:

President Bush has set a record he'd presumably prefer to avoid: the highest disapproval rating of any president in the 70-year history of the Gallup Poll. In a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken Friday through Sunday, 28% of Americans approve of the job Bush is doing; 69% disapprove. The approval rating matches the low point of his presidency, and the disapproval sets a new high for any president. . . .

The previous record of 67% was reached by Harry Truman in January 1952, when the United States was enmeshed in the Korean War. . . . In another record, the percentage of Americans who say the invasion of Iraq was a mistake reached a new high, 63%, in the latest poll. . . . By 69%-27%, those polled say Bush's tenure in general has been a failure, not a success."...

It's just the latest evidence of a spectacular crash. Back in November, Page reported that for the first time in the history of the Gallup Poll, 50 percent of Americans said they "strongly disapproved" of the president. That shattered the previous high of 48 percent reached by Richard Nixon just before an impeachment inquiry was launched in 1974. In my Jan. 15 column, I wrote about two polls showing that Americans by an overwhelming 4-1 ratio want the next president to set the nation in a new direction. And last week, in my April 15 column, I wrote about a Washington Post/ABC News poll that found Bush had surpassed Harry Truman's record as the president to linger longest without majority public approval. Bush's job-approval rating has been under 50 percent since January 2005 -- three years and three months and counting.

Don't Count Him Out Yet

Presidential confidante Fred Barnes writes in the Weekly Standard about his "pet peeve": When people call Bush a lame duck.

[H]e's not that lame. . . . Bush lacks popularity, but he has plenty of power. And he's committed to using it. Bush's power--indeed, any president's--comes from the Constitution, not from opinion polls or the number of months left in his White House tenure. He is commander in chief and architect of America's foreign policy. He can use his veto to shape or kill legislation. He can exploit the presidential megaphone to express his views and raise alarms, and his power to issue administrative decrees is significant as well. . . . For months now, the buzz in Washington has been about Bush's ability to go about his presidential business and remain upbeat and determined. The suspicion is he's simply pretending, since his power is gone. Wrong on both counts.

Torture Watch

Joby Warrick writes in The Washington Post about Adel al-Nusairi, a former Saudi policeman captured in Afghanistan in 2002, who says he was drugged before his interrogations in U.S. custody.

At least two dozen other former and current detainees at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere say they were given drugs against their will or witnessed other inmates being drugged, based on interviews and court documents. The Defense Department and the CIA, the two agencies responsible for detaining terrorism suspects, both deny using drugs as an enhancement for interrogations, and suggest that the stories from Nusairi and others like him are either fabrications or mistaken interpretations of routine medical treatment.

Yet the allegations have resurfaced because of the release this month of a 2003 Justice Department memo that explicitly condoned the use of drugs on detainees. Written to provide legal justification for interrogation practices, the memo by then-Justice Department lawyer John C. Yoo rejected a decades-old U.S. ban on the use of 'mind-altering substances' on prisoners. Instead, he argued that drugs could be used as long as they did not inflict permanent or 'profound' psychological damage. U.S. law 'does not preclude any and all use of drugs,' Yoo wrote in the memo. He declined to comment for this article.

The memo has prompted new calls for the Bush administration to give a full accounting of its treatment of detainees, and to make public detailed prison medical records. Legal experts and human rights groups say that forced drugging of detainees for any nontherapeutic reasons would be a particularly grave breach of international treaties banning torture...