An Awful April, But Bush Hangs On

CBS' Kuhn: President Still Leads In Polls Despite Month Of Trouble

(CBS)  By David Paul Kuhn,
CBSNews.com Chief Political Writer

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Three polls this week show President Bush maintaining a slim lead over Sen. John Kerry despite what has been the most politically damaging month of his presidency.

The past month has been the deadliest for U.S. troops in Iraq since the war began. The president’s former top terrorism adviser raised a firestorm by charging that Mr. Bush went to war in Iraq to the detriment of the larger war on terrorism. And most vividly, U.S. media began showing graphic images of dead Americans.

Yet the president weathers the storm.

Tuesday's CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll and an ABC News/Washington Post poll, combined with one Wednesday from Quinnipiac University, all show the president with a four- or five-point lead over Kerry.

"We can reject the hypothesis that Bush has been harmed by the last few weeks, which is a surprise to some observers," said Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of the Gallup Poll and vice president of the Gallup Organization. "There may be to some degree a mini-rally effect. When Americans are in harm's way internationally, typically there is a rally around the president, at least in the short term.

"But remember, the presidential job approval is steady between 50 and 53 percent for the past few months," Newport said, cautioning that any overarching conclusions that the president is politically invulnerable would be hasty.

Nevertheless, the Bush-Cheney campaign has greeted the three national polls with as an affirmation that its strategy – and its advertising campaign – is working.

"After last month, with pundits out there saying the president is weak, in trouble, the president in almost every attribute has improved," Bush strategist Matthew Dowd told reporters in a conference call Tuesday.

Not quite. The Quinnipiac poll shows that Mr. Bush's approval rating has not improved, but has held steady at about 47 or 48 percent. The other polls agree and also find that only about half of Americans think the war was worth fighting, a result of a slow, steady decline in the last few months.

Regardless, the fact that the president's numbers have not declined has astounded many experts inside and outside Washington.

Dowd's explanation is that the "public had a much more realistic picture on [the war in Iraq], the long term, that there would be times when it was not going well."

Kevin Phillips, former strategist for President Richard Nixon, explains that Mr. Bush's political stamina is more a result of when the polling was done than an indication that he has escaped politically unscathed.

"There was some halo effect among ordinary voters even though the press corps didn't think he did well during the president's press conference," Phillips said. "Second, is a weak general economics out of Kerry; and the third, is the Bush advertising."

President Bush spent a record $50 million in the month of March, an astounding $46 million of which went to advertising.

A Kerry pollster, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that the presumptive Democratic nominee's campaign does not think Mr. Bush's sturdy poll numbers are due to advertising.

"The bottom line is that everything we see so far reflects the fact that this race is pretty even and pretty stable," the pollster said. "The election is not taking place this week and what we need to do is continue to build. People are going to learn a lot more on who Kerry is."

Though Phillips points out that what Americans have seen of Kerry so far has not necessarily been flattering to the Massachusetts senator.

"I think Kerry's demeanor plays a role. On a bad day, he looks like should be in an undertaking parlor," Phillips said. "He did much better in that interview with Tim Russert... but Kerry has not looked vibrant, quite the reverse."

Phillips added that that the polling taken last week was also likely affected by "the last stages of the 9/11 committee hearing."

"You had all these references to how the FBI and CIA had screwed up," he continued. "I think it took the attention off the fact that Bush is the guy who is supposed to be in charge of all of this."

Some political strategists question whether Kerry was too quiet at the height of President Bush's problems. They argue Kerry has waited too long to present a viable alterative to the war in Iraq.

Most pertinently, they question if Kerry is capable of speaking plainly to the public. After all, presidents don't get elected on policy so much as on their ability to convey it.

"I don't think that Kerry has figured out how to verbalize these things," Phillips said. "I think the man does really have to watch out for this lack of aggressiveness and the loss of credibility as he's waffled and not been particularly articulate or tough."

The Kerry campaign knows this all too well. They are working to present their candidate as "the strong alternative," Kerry’s pollster said, adding, "The most important factor is going to be how people evaluate the success or failures of this administration."