Unconventional Wisdom The Ol' Bush Magic
[no byline given]
As if the Democrats don't already know it, George W. Bush is a magic man. Merely mentioning Dubya's name seems to be enough to sweeten the otherwise sour mood of the country, though his mojo still pales in comparison with the power that Bill Clinton once had to brighten the public's view.
At least that's one way to interpret the results of an experiment conducted by The Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Foundation and Harvard University as part of a recent national poll.
The survey of 2,886 randomly selected Americans included two standard poll questions. The first asked whether people thought the country was headed in the right direction or was "seriously off on the wrong track." The second asked whether those interviewed approved or disapproved of the job Bush was doing as president.
To measure the "Bush effect," the interviewers varied the order of the questions. Half of the respondents were first asked what they thought about Bush's performance. Then they were asked about the direction of the country. For the other half, the order was reversed.
And voilà: Asking first about Bush boosted the proportion that saw the country headed in the right direction by eight percentage points -- from 34 percent to 42 percent.
Bush's magic didn't hold in the other direction, however. His job approval rating fell by about 6 percentage points (to 60 percent) when people were first asked where they thought the country was headed. "People's opinions about the president and the direction of the country are intertwined," said Larry Hugick, vice president of Princeton Survey Research Associates, which conducted the Post/Kaiser/Harvard poll. "If the Bush approval question is first, people tend to respond in the context of their views of Bush and therefore express more positive views about where the country is headed. If the direction question is first, dissatisfaction with the country tends to depress Bush's ratings."
But Bush isn't the equal of the master presidential prestidigitator, Bill Clinton -- at least not yet. When The Post conducted a similar test of Clinton's mood-swaying prowess in 1998, asking the job approval question first was enough to boost the right direction number by 10 percentage points.
But unlike what happened with the Bush test, asking the right direction first didn't move the Clinton job approval rating one bit, suggesting that public views of Clinton in his sixth year in the White House were more firmly fixed than current opinions of Bush.