Americans Concerned with Bush Agenda

A poll just released today, conducted by the NY Times and CBS, shows that despite the "mandate" Bush claimed just days after the election, a large percentage of Americans have concerns over the agenda of his second term.

At a time when the White House has portrayed Mr. Bush's 3.5-million-vote victory as a mandate, the poll found that Americans are at best ambivalent about Mr. Bush's plans to reshape Social Security, rewrite the tax code, cut taxes and appoint conservative judges to the bench. There is continuing disapproval of Mr. Bush's handling of the war in Iraq, with a plurality now saying it was a mistake to invade in the first place.

The results lead to an intersting conclusion. It would seem that many of those who voted for Bush had some vague approval of him when it came to terrorism and moral values, but that even many of those voters take issue with the specific policies that Bush seeks to enact now.

It's an odd result, and further proof that people vote based largely on their feelings about substantial but vague issues, such as moral values, and not so much on how they feel about very specific policies being carried out. I think that's reinforcement of the explanation going around for the difficulties the Democrats had in this last election that they had difficulty because of a lack of vision, purpose, or message.

And something else, which is almost too unbelievable to be plausable:

Finally, in one bit of presumably good news for a party that is looking for it, Americans now have a better opinion of the Democratic Party than of the Republican Party: 54 percent said they had a favorable view of Democrats, compared with 39 percent with an unfavorable view. By contrast, 49 percent have a favorable view of Republicans, compared with 46 percent holding an unfavorable one.

The irony is too rich.