In Arizona, Judy Donovan says she feels desperate
for a new president. In Tennessee, Robert Wilson says he finds
the president revolting. In Washington state,
Maria Yurasek says she'd vote for a dog if it could beat President Bush.
A subtext to this year's presidential campaign
is the intense anger that many Democrats are directing toward Bush,
an attitude that has been growing in recent months.
"I've never seen anything like it," says Ted Jelen,
a political science professor at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.
"There are people who just really, really hate
this person."
Fully a quarter of Americans - mostly Democrats
- tell pollsters they have a very unfavorable opinion of the president,
more than double the number from last April.
When only Democrats are polled, more than half report they feel that way.
Further, in exit polls conducted during Democratic
primaries, a sizable chunk of voters have been describing themselves
as not just dissatisfied with Bush but outright
angry - 51 percent in Delaware, 46 percent in Arizona and New Hampshire,
44 percent in Virginia and Wisconsin.
"They really have a head of steam up against Bush,"
said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the
People & the Press. He said the level of
political polarization surrounding Bush, the division between Republicans
who favor
him and Democrats who don't, exceeds even that
for President Clinton in September 1998 during the impeachment battle.
A substantial number of independents who voted
in the Democratic primaries expressed anger at Bush as well, exit polls
found.
For example, almost half of independents in the
Delaware primary said they were angry, and about four in 10 in Virginia,
Arizona,
Iowa and New Hampshire. In Wisconsin, one in
10 of the Republicans who voted in the primaries said they were angry at
Bush,
and more than twice that many said they were
dissatisfied.
Plenty of presidents have generated intense feelings,
of course, but Democrats - and even some Republicans - think the
phenomenon is outsized this year.
"I've never seen a Democratic Party more unified
and more focused, and the anger helps do just that," said GOP pollster
Frank Luntz.
"The intensity level is just so high. They're
using four-letter words to describe him."
In a recent focus group that Luntz conducted for
MSNBC, technicians had to adjust the volume levels because the Bush-haters
were
"so gosh-darn loud" they were drowning out the
president's supporters, who were more numerous, Luntz said. "It was a real
problem."
Bush was asked about the anger in a recent interview
on NBC and said he found it perplexing and disappointing. "When you ask
hard things of people, it can create tensions.
And heck, I don't know why people do it," he said.
His campaign spokesman, Terry Holt, dismisses
the anger as something stoked by Democratic presidential candidates and
confined
to core party activists. He said it also reflects
Democratic frustration at Bush's success in pushing through his agenda.
John McAdams, a political scientist at Marquette
University, said resentment of Bush is particularly strong among liberals
who already
hold three things against him: "First, he's a
conservative. Second, he's a Christian. And third, he's a Texan. When you
add all of those
things up, that invokes pretty much every symbol
of the cultural wars."
"It's particularly galling when somebody who mangles
his syntax and doesn't pronounce words extremely well and is from Texas
beats you,"
McAdams added.
Some of the anger at Bush stretches back to his
2000 election, when the president lost the popular vote but took the majority
of electoral
votes after the Supreme Court stopped a recount
in Florida.
"It's the long view of Bush in the minds of Democrats,"
said pollster Kohut. "He came into office in a way that they felt was unfair.
They gave him the benefit of the doubt and rallied
to him after the 9-11 attacks for some time, and then he disappointed them
in the
way he dealt with Iraq" and by pursuing a more
conservative course than they expected.
A Bush opponent can vote against the president
only once in November, no matter how intense the anger. So does it matter
how much
voters dislike him, if these are people who would
have voted against him anyway?
Political analysts say the intensity of the anti-Bush
sentiment could translate into higher turnout by mobilizing the Democratic
base.
The possible pitfall for Democrats, however,
is that strident anti-Bush rhetoric could turn off swing and independent
voters who like
Bush personally but might be convinced through
reasoned argument that his policies are wrongheaded.
"Anger is not necessarily a productive emotion
when it comes to politics," Luntz said. "The anger against Bill Clinton
was so fierce
and over the top that it helped him in 1996 and
then again during the impeachment in 1998. People got more angry at those
yelling
at the president than at the president himself.
You could easily see the same thing happening here."
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