President Bush has signed his new tax-cut legislation into law, and is now dominating news coverage with his major international trip to Russia, Europe, and the Middle East. But it's hard to find evidence that any of this has made a major difference -- so far -- in Americans' opinions of his presidency. In Gallup's May 30-June 1 poll, the president's job approval rating was 64%, slightly lower than the 66% of two weeks ago, and continuing the downward trend from Bush's 2003 highpoint of 71% in March.
Middle East
Certainly there is every indication that Americans endorse Bush's dramatic visit to the Middle East and his efforts to press for implementation of the "road map" to peace with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas. The weekend Gallup Poll shows that 79% of Americans believe achieving a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians should be one of the Bush administration's priorities (although only 17% say it should be the top priority). Other recent Gallup polling also shows that the American public is more optimistic about the possibility of peace than it has been in the past.
It also appears that Americans are in favor of the specific elements of the road map to peace that the United States has helped develop. The weekend poll shows that Americans approve of the key component of the road map -- the creation of an independent Palestinian state -- by a 58% to 22% margin. Along the same lines, a recent University of Maryland/Program on International Attitudes poll -- administered to a random sample of Americans via a complex computer-based system -- demonstrated that 74% of those polled agree with the specific steps involved in the first phase of the road map.
Weapons of Mass Destruction
The public, according to the University of Maryland poll, also buys into the notion that the American victory in the Iraqi war makes it easier for Bush to push for peace in the Middle East. That's good news for the administration. A focus on the secondary benefits of the war with Iraq takes attention away from what could yet become a significant problem for the administration -- the lack of evidence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, despite the fact that their existence formed so much of the coalition rationale for the initiation of military action there.
The failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is apparently more of an issue overseas at this point than here at home. But all three of the leading American newsmagazines this week include stories about the elusive WMD, including a major article in U.S. News and World Report. There's also little doubt that Democratic candidates for president are prepared to criticize Bush on the WMD issue in the weeks ahead if it appears that the American public is starting to focus on it.
But Americans don't seem concerned yet. We just don't find any strong evidence that the absence of WMD is troubling to a majority of the public, 56% of whom say that the war with Iraq was justified even if the United States does not find conclusive evidence that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. This percentage is similar to what we measured on this topic in early April, but it does mark a drop from the 41% who said on March 23 that they would believe the war to be justified only if WMD were found. It appears, in other words, that the public has recalibrated its rationale for the war as time has passed.
Occupation of Iraq
The Bush administration is also faced with the (not surprising) fact that coalition military forces are having trouble running Iraq after its leadership and infrastructure essentially vanished overnight with the arrival of American and British armed forces in Baghdad. But this also doesn't yet seem to be overwhelmingly troubling to Americans, 70% of whom say that things are going at least moderately well in Iraq "now that the major fighting has ended." This does, however, represent a slightly less positive response than what we found in late April, when 86% of Americans were convinced that things were going at least moderately well in post-war Iraq.
Bush's Tax Cut
Despite Bush's overseas focus this week, the major domestic issue remains the economy. For the Bush administration, fixing the economy means tax cuts, and last Wednesday we saw the president signing into law the third tax-cut bill of his administration.
There's little question that Americans are not overly enthusiastic about tax cuts. Before the signing of the most recent bill, there was no major pressure from the public for federal income tax relief. In fact, Americans are less likely to complain about income taxes now than at any other point in the past 40 years, and a slight majority says that the amount of taxes paid by the middle class is fair -- marking a major turnaround in attitudes on this question. Indeed, at this point, Americans are more worried about property taxes than their federal income taxes, suggesting that the Bush administration may have been going after the wrong target.
Thus, it's not surprising that only a relatively modest 47% of Americans say that the new tax cuts are a good idea at this time. And it's less surprising still that most of those who do say that tax cuts are a good idea are Republicans, reflecting the political nature of this round of tax cuts, which were passed by the very slimmest of margins in a strictly partisan U.S. Senate vote.
The new weekend Gallup Poll also informs us that only 35% of Americans feel that the new tax cuts will help their families' financial situations. There's a somewhat greater sense that the tax cuts will help the U.S. economy more generally, but even that sentiment, the cornerstone of the Bush administration's rationale for the tax cuts, is relatively subdued, with 47% saying that the cuts will benefit the economy and exactly the same number saying that they will not.
Still, Bush's eagerness to get the tax-cut bill passed -- in any form -- underscores the degree to which the administration recognizes the importance of establishing a track record of taking action vis-à-vis the economy. Bush is quite well positioned now should there be an economic recovery over the next year, as is likely. Most people tend to confuse correlation with causation, and a new economic law followed by an economic recovery would no doubt induce many to assume that the latter was caused by the former. That's despite the fact that few Americans -- and for that matter few economists -- will be able to determine precisely how much of any economic change is a direct result of the new tax cuts.
Democratic Presidential Nomination
Democrats vying for their party's presidential nomination are still toiling in relative obscurity at this point, but it's early. We've just updated our measure of Democrats' preferences for their party's nomination, and it shows more of the same -- a muddled pack with no clear front-runner.
But a couple of points are becoming clearer each time we look at these Democratic trial heat results. North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, once touted by some observers as a new John F. Kennedy whose youth and good looks would quickly push him to the top of the Democratic pack, has yet to show any signs of catching on among his party's faithful. He gets only 6% of registered Democrats' votes in our latest poll.
It's the same three candidates -- Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman and Missouri Rep. Richard Gephardt -- who consistently get more votes than their competitors. In the weekend poll, 20% of registered Democrats say they would be most likely to support Lieberman for their party's nomination, 17% would be most likely to support Kerry, and 14% would support Gephardt. Two men who have been quite outspoken in their criticism of President Bush -- Florida Sen. Bob Graham and Vermont Gov. Howard Dean -- show no signs of breaking out of single digits.
We need to be reminded, however, of three numbers: less than 2%, 11%, and 2%. Those are the percentages of Democrats who preferred Jimmy Carter, Michael Dukakis, and Bill Clinton in the summers of 1975, 1987, and 1991, respectively. All three, of course, went on to grab their party's nomination, and two ultimately became president. Indeed, Clinton didn't make his move into double digits in the Democrats' preference list until 1992.
Homosexuals as Clergy
Presbyterians postponed voting on a gay clergy ban at their meetings just concluded in Denver. While the Presbyterians are hardly representative of the overall American population (only about 2% of Americans in our typical survey identify as Presbyterian), our data from the overall U.S. adult population show generally mixed feelings about gays and lesbians becoming clergy members. Fifty-six percent of Americans in Gallup's May 19-21 poll said that homosexuals should be hired as clergy, a number that has stayed remarkably similar over the last seven years, despite the fact that an overwhelming 88% of Americans favor laws protecting the rights of homosexuals in the workplace.
Death Penalty
Death penalty opponents are no doubt heartened by the Illinois state legislature's passage of a new law reforming the process by which the death penalty can be applied in that state (although Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich has yet to sign it into law). At the same time, however, news stories report that prosecutors will ask for the death penalty in the case of accused serial killer Derrick Todd Lee in Louisiana. Recently captured Olympic bombing suspect Eric Robert Rudolph could also face the death penalty.
Generally speaking, anti-death penalty activists have little to show for their efforts to change the mind of the average American on the issue. Our recent update shows that 74% of Americans still approve of the death penalty in cases of murder, indicating no drop off in support over the last several years. That's despite the fact that more than 7 in 10 Americans believe that at least one innocent person over the past five years has been wrongly executed. Almost half of Americans say that the death penalty is not imposed enough, while only 23% say it is imposed too often.