May 3, 2006

Washington High School: The Popular Kids Rule

Let us stipulate I am not so naïve as to think George W. Bush likes a 32 percent approval rating. And let’s acknowledge the obvious about the excellent choice of Tony Snow as White House Press Secretary – that a top Snow priority is to make the case for the president’s policies and governance more effectively than his predecessor.

Having said all that, is anyone curious about the measurement by which the media consensus arrived at the common descriptions of the Bush administration as “struggling” or “faltering” or “off its game”? If the administration is really struggling (yeah, let’s choose one and stick with it), it makes sense to ask what objective they are struggling to achieve.

Struggling to do what? And what is the evidence of this?

So far as I can tell, this owes to one measurement and one measurement alone: 32 percent. Poll numbers. Popularity. Not a great number, to be sure, although we probably all know people who would be thrilled to learn that they are liked by a third of the people who know them.

But who established that it is the primary objective of a presidential administration to be popular? If leaving office with everyone loving you is the mark of a great president, then why don’t presidential candidates just promise to send everyone birthday cards with $20 bills in them? That would make me like you. A hundred would be even better, but I’ll go like on you for 20.

What would that do to actually serve the nation? I have no idea, but that has apparently ceased to matter. According to modern-day conventional wisdom, an administration is succeeding or failing solely on the basis of how it polls.

How do we assess their performance on tax policy and budgeting? War planning for Iran? Running the national parks? They may be doing just fine – or not – but it doesn’t matter because Bush’s approval rating is 32 percent, and being popular is the only objective of a presidential administration.

To be sure, good poll numbers are better than bad, and popularity has its uses. It’s hard in this day and age to get skittish members of the House and Senate to follow you on a controversial Social Security proposal if they’re not confident you can provide them with political cover. But how much of that owes to Washington’s overall obsession with popularity and polls to begin with? Do you think these guys, when they first decided to run for office and conveyed high-sounding platitudes on the campaign trail, were secretly thinking to themselves, “Nuh-uh . . . if I get there it’s path-of-least-resistance all the way!”

At some point between your arrival in Washington and the completion of your assimilation, someone apparently opens up your cranium and inserts the notion that being liked trumps everything else. I suspect the wording of the notion begins like this: “Remember what you thought was important in high school? Well . . . ”

I am sure Bush wants better poll numbers, and I’m sure he has Snow strategizing on how to achieve them. (And I wouldn’t bet against Snow.) But if you’ve ever been to Washington, you’ll notice that there are an awful lot of buildings around that are filled with people who actually work for the federal government – and I don’t they think they all write press releases.

What do they do? Are they struggling? Would it show up in the almighty polls if they were doing a good job, a bad job or heading out at 2 p.m. every day for ice cream?

Up the street from the White House and Capitol Hill, at RFK Stadium, the Washington Nationals (as of this writing) have an approval rating – er, winning percentage – of a Bush-like .318. Now they are struggling. They have one job, to win ballgames, and they’re doing it about as often as you bump into a person on the street who approves of George W. Bush. Not often enough.

No one fails to understand the measurement of success and failure for a baseball team, except maybe the owners of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. The higher your winning percentage, the better you’re doing.

The performance of a president and his administration can hardly be broken down to such a simple and straightforward number. And yet our leading pundits and anchorpeople consider it a foregone conclusion that they are “struggling” because polls are bad and news coverage is hostile.

One story announcing Snow’s appointment described the administration as “in political trouble.” How can a president who is constitutionally barred from running again be in political anything? Perhaps Tony Snow will be more effective than what we have seen to date at informing us about the real work being done by the administration – governance, not poll pandering. If Snow does so, and the numbers improve as a result, I still don’t see how it matters a hill of beans for the fate of the nation.

But if Bush’s poll numbers improve, one suspects they will stop being such a prominent news story. Someone might have to write about substance instead, and that alone would be a service to the nation.

This is Column # DC31. Request permission to publish here.