All a Matter of Perspective

Our old friend Pat of Brainster's Blog had this to say about John Hinderaker's recent review of President Bush's decline in the polls in the year since his reelection:

Things seem bad? Why?

Since that triumphant moment, the conventional wisdom is that nothing has gone right for the Republicans. But what, exactly, has happened to cause such a reversal in the party's fortunes? Has the economy collapsed? Not at all. It is humming along as strongly as ever, putting ever more distance between America's prosperity and that of Europe and Japan. Have the terrorists attacked the American homeland, exposing a weakness in our domestic security? No. Astonishingly, we have now gone more than four years without a successful attack on American soil, even though newspaper headlines reveal, on an almost daily basis, the bloodthirstiness of our enemies. Have there been setbacks in foreign policy that could explain how a party that was triumphant just 12 months ago should now be in full retreat? No. We continue to make progress in both Iraq and Afghanistan. On a number of fronts, liberty has taken root in the vital Middle East. And no foreign power even imagines that it could rival the United States in influence.

The biggest part of the problem is that the media are dead set against the president, so that any poll that shows his popularity declining is headlined, while polls showing his popularity going back up are buried on page A-23.

This reflects very closely a discussion my wife and I were having over the weekend with some family members, who are lifelong Democrats that jumped over and voted for Bush last year. Although they are morally/socially conservative, they grew up with that old lie that the Democrats are the only ones who care about the black community.

Now that they are beginning to open their eyes to the real issues and to lean more and more toward the Republican point of view, the biggest question that comes up is, "Then why is the entire nation against the president and the Republicans?" The whole "power of the press" to drive the political scene and shape the national outlook is sometimes a hard thing to overcome.