The 100-day honeymoon of George W. Bush and the national media was
          celebrated with a surfeit of banal analysis and superficial polling data—nearly all
          of which ignored a fundamental question about his Presidency. Why does Mr. Bush
          enjoy approval ratings of better than 55 percent when he is pursuing policies that
          most voters clearly don’t like?

          Certainly he has benefited from the supine Washington press corps, whose leading
          voices still tend to discuss the new President in terms of happy contrast with his
          predecessor. In keeping with this theme, the current clichés echo the  “character”
          propaganda of last year’s Republican campaign. Unlike Bill Clinton, according to
          the predominant pap, Mr Bush is “straightforward,” “plain-spoken,” “steady”
          and in some vague sense “Presidential.”

          These flattering descriptions fill a vacuum formerly occupied by critical (and
          frequently poisonous) coverage of the Clinton White House. There is little mystery
          about why this has happened. The conservative attack machine that blared
          continuous abuse of everyone associated with the Clinton administration has been
          reprogrammed into an automated applause track.

          The result was on display last weekend at the White House Correspondents’
          Dinner, an event that has reliably featured obnoxious personal disparagement of the
          Clintons, to the undisguised delight of the assembled reporters and pundits. Now
          that Mr. Bush is President, the only permissible jokes were the mild tweaks he
          inflicts upon himself as disarming schtick. David Carr of Inside.com reported that
          Saturday Night Live comedian Darrell Hammond not only confined his dinner
          repartee to wisecracks about the Clintons and Al Gore, but actually started sniffling
          when Mr. Bush entered the Hilton ballroom.

          “It was the perfect example of all the sucking up to Bush that’s been going on every
          day in this town since he was elected,” complained James Warren, the Chicago
          Tribune bureau chief, who added, “We have been effectively emasculated …. It’s a
          natural tendency of people, including reporters, to want to be liked, and that, combined
          with some pretty impressive early discipline from the Bush people, means that he is having
          a great honeymoon. So far, we’ve made a virtue out of his shortcomings.”

          That strange alchemy is amplified by the powerful rightward tilt of the American
          media in recent years. While the influence of network newscasts and newspaper
          editorial pages shrinks, most political discussion is relegated to cable television, an
          environment where Mr. Bush benefits from an unprecedented ideological
          advantage. Emblematic of this trend was CNBC’s decision to air a program on his
          first 100 days that featured commentary exclusively from the staff of The Wall
          Street Journal editorial page. The “Democrats” and “liberals” who offer their
          commentary on cable, strangely enough, often tend to be Bush admirers who
          reserve their harshest remarks for their own party.

          Yet because the audience for those broadcasts is relatively small, media bias doesn’t
          quite explain Mr. Bush’s buoyancy in recent polls. However partisan the bulk of
          political commentary may be, most Americans probably ignore most of it, just as
          they did during the impeachment crisis. What really protects Mr. Bush from public
          displeasure is that so much reportage and commentary dwells admiringly on the
          “style” (or “discipline”) of his White House rather than on the substance of its policies.

          How this imbalance affects mass opinion is shown in a poll just released by the Pew
          Research Center. The Pew survey found roughly the same approval rating for Mr.
          Bush as several other polls that marked his first 100 days, about 56 percent. But the
          Pew researchers also asked a few questions that revealed a surprising ignorance
          about his least popular policies. Only 25 percent of the respondents were aware of
          his decisions about carbon-dioxide emissions, and even fewer knew that he had
          ditched the Kyoto treaty. Astonishingly, half of those polled said they had “heard
          nothing at all about the debate over arsenic in drinking water.”

          If this survey accurately reflects the dismal level of public knowledge about White
          House environmental policy, then how likely is it that people understand Mr. Bush’s
          approach to taxation, the economy and the budget? Do they realize that his tax cuts
          are skewed to the wealthiest 1 percent of the population? Do they know that he
          plans to loot the Medicare surplus to fund those tax cuts? Are they aware that he is
          somewhere to the right of Ronald Reagan on most issues?

          The obvious answer to such questions suggests still another reason why Mr. Bush
          has escaped the difficulties that might otherwise afflict an aggressively conservative
          President, especially one who lacks a popular mandate. Although the Democratic
          leadership in Congress has resisted some of his worst ideas, they have failed so far
          to communicate a message of opposition and an alternative set of policies.

          There is no real majority backing this President—and now it is past time for
          someone to stand up and declare the honeymoon over.

          You may reach Joe Conason via email at: jconason@observer.com