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POLITICS-US: Bush Presidency Enters Terminal Phase

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jul 2 2007 (IPS) - There may be moments during their summit at his family&#39s compound in Kennebunkport, Maine when U.S. President George W. Bush looks with envy on his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, whose popularity at home guarantees him vast influence even as he prepares to leave office just nine months from now.

Not so for Bush, whose public approval ratings, according to polls released in just the past week, have reached all-time lows and whose influence – even over his own party – appears to be declining at warp speed.

The latter phenomenon was demonstrated to devastating effect last week when 37 of the Senate&#39s 49 Republicans deserted the president on a critical procedural vote that appears to have doomed Bush&#39s hopes for comprehensive immigration reform through the remaining 18 months of his term in office.

The vote marked the defeat of the most important and probably the easiest of his second term&#39s four top domestic priorities that also included changing the social security system, easing taxes, and legislation designed to discourage tort litigation and class actions. "He is now almost zero-for four," noted the Washington Post.

But the immigration bill&#39s defeat was just one of a whole series of events last week that appeared to diminish whatever residual political strength Bush enjoyed going into the summer months.

The week began with a declaration of independence – and total frustration – by two key Republican senators, former Foreign Relations Committee chairman Richard Lugar and George Voinovich, over Bush&#39s determination to maintain his "surge" strategy in Iraq beyond next fall.

A floor speech by Lugar, which was also hailed by former Armed Services Committee chairman John Warner, appeared to confirm that Bush, his military commanders and diplomatic officers in Baghdad have no more than 75 days – or until mid-September – to produce a dramatic turnaround in Iraq or face irresistible political pressure in Congress to begin withdrawing U.S. combat troops by early 2008 at the very latest.

In a subsequent interview, Lugar compared his speech to his break with Ronald Reagan over the latter&#39s veto of anti-apartheid legislation in the mid-1980s. Lugar played a key role in getting Congress to override the veto, the only time Congress did so in Reagan&#39s eight years in power.

The week ended with the expiration Friday of Bush&#39s five-year-old "fast-track" authority to negotiate new trade agreements and a vow by the Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives to oppose a pending trade deal with South Korea and another with Colombia.

Renewing fast-track authority, which permits the president to submit new trade accords to Congress for an up-or-down vote without the possibility of any amendments, was another top administration priority that now appears to have fallen by the wayside.

If those setbacks were not enough, the Post ran an unprecedented investigative series during the week on the role of Dick Cheney which depicted the president as essentially the young dauphin to the vice president&#39s Cardinal Richelieu – something that has long been understood by Washington insiders, but whose operational specifics were until now somewhat elusive.

Monday’s extraordinary commutation by Bush of the prison sentence meted out to Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby for lying to federal investigators, will surely add to the impression that Bush, whose insistence that he would not intervene in the case while it was still on appeal, remains in thrall to the vice president and his neo-conservative cheerleaders.

What Post the series disclosed, according to the paper&#39s veteran, if endlessly forgiving, political columnist, David Broder, was "a vice president who used the broad authority given him by a complaisant chief executive to bend the decision-making process to his own ends and purposes, often overriding Cabinet officers and other executive branch officials along the way."

The series, which provided new grist for the mills of the talk-show hosts and comedians who dominate late-night television, served only to further diminish Bush. His approval ratings in successive public opinion polls have now dropped to their lowest level ever and are approaching those of Richard Nixon just before his resignation from office in the wake of the Watergate scandal and his impeachment in 1974.

That the series coincided with Cheney&#39s unprecedented and widely mocked insistence that he did not have to abide by certain secrecy rules because, as president of the Senate, he was not part of the executive branch only added to the derision leveled against the administration.

Indeed, Cheney&#39s own approval ratings, like Bush&#39s, have dropped to historical lows. Just 28 percent said they approved of his handling of his job in a CBS News poll taken late last week, down from 35 percent in early 2006, and a high of 56 percent in August 2002, the same month that he launched the administration&#39s own campaign to rally support for invading Iraq.

The same CBS poll found Bush at a record low of 27 percent, just one percentage point higher than the all-time, all-poll low recorded by Newsweek the previous week. Fox News, whose surveys have generally shown higher approval rates than other polls, also reported its all-time low last week at 31 percent.

Bush&#39s public approval rating fell below 50 percent in most polls between his re-election in November 2004 and his second-term inauguration two months later and has not recovered since, giving him the record for the "longest sustained rejection by the American public" in modern U.S. history, according to the Post.

While vehement right-wing Republican opposition to the immigration bill helped explain the Bush&#39s latest plunge in the polls, Iraq remains the single most important factor to the president&#39s unpopularity.

In last week&#39s CBS poll, 23 percent of respondents said they approved of his handling of the war, while 70 percent, including one-third of all self-identified Republicans, said they disapproved. Moreover, a whopping 77 percent of respondents said the war was going either "somewhat" (30 percent) or "very badly" (47 percent).

A record 40 percent said all U.S. troops should be withdrawn, while another 26 percent said they favoured a decreasing the number of troops there now. A CNN poll taken a few days before showed similar numbers.

With elections 16 months away, Republican incumbents are increasingly aware that Bush/Cheney has become a serious drag on their political aspirations. And, as the election draws near, the pressure to break with the White House – absent a major change of course, at least in Iraq – will become irresistible, just as it did last week on the immigration bill.