Hoosiers Losing Faith in Bush

Even red red red ol’ Indiana is turning on Bush. Hoosiers now disapprove of the direction in which the country is headed by a wide margin: 61% say we’re on the wrong track. And 56% disapprove of the president’s job performance.

All the macro reasons we’ve been hating on Bush lo these many years, knowing what would be their inevitable results, have started to become glaringly, unavoidably apparent on the micro level, and people just can’t defend their votes for the man any longer.

Kay Melloy, a 64-year-old independent voter from Chandler, finds nothing to approve of in Bush's job performance. She's especially distressed by the amount of money Bush is spending overseas in Iraq, when there are so many needs in the United States.

She works in a bank, she said, and sees elderly people with very little to live on.

"It goes through me like a knife," Melloy said.

The WaPo’s Alan Abramowitz thinks incompetence is behind Bush’s bad poll numbers, and I’m sure that’s part of it, but out here in the red states of Middle America, I think something else is at work. People I’ve spoken to in this area are very reluctant to hold the president—any president, even those they don’t like and didn’t vote for—personally responsible for a large array of problems. They’re not well-versed, nor particularly interested, in how a president’s economic policies tangibly affect the economy, which is why Bush can sell tax cuts by ridiculous anecdotes about how much they’ll help a family of four in Dingleberry, Texas. While political junkies see the tangled web of interrelated connections between politics, policy, and the direction of the ship of state, many voters who have only a passing interest in politics seem to view many of the same issues as happening in a void. The president and his policies don’t affect the economy; all he can do is respond to changes in the economy.

So while we look at any given policy and say, “This is going to have disastrous results,” they don’t. They take the president on his word that it’s going to be great, and only years later, when those disastrous results finally come to fruition in their daily lives—when they’re personally affected—do they maybe start to make the connection.

This is yet another reason why it’s so devastating that the media doesn’t critique policy anymore, but simply reports the president’s (or his party’s) endorsement of it, their explanations about why it’s brilliant and how it will be helpful to the average American—because the average American believes it. Given no alternative, no context, they will not extrapolate how any specific policy may actually affect them 5 years down the line.

Now we’re 5 years down the line. Now Hoosier veterans are coming home, and they’re grousing about their experiences. Support for the war on terror starts to fall. Now Hoosiers are starting to see people struggling to make ends meet who didn’t have to struggle before. Support for economic policies starts to fall.

The ship of state moves slowly. When it ends up, years later, at a destination the captain didn’t promise, only then do many of its passengers begin to grumble. “My ticket said Ownership Society, not Social Darwinism. What are we doing here?”

That’s not about competence. It’s about being taken for a ride.