- LAKE, Mich. -- The big mystery
out here in the land of woods and lakes is: Who are the pollsters polling
when they keep coming up with such high numbers for President Bush's approval
rating?
-
- The people I talk to around here -- farmers, insurance
salesmen, factory workers, food service employees and retirees -- have
very little good to say about the president's performance thus far.
-
- In general, they regard him as a lightweight, out of
his depth, a show-and-tell president who scares them with his constant
talk about widening the "War against Terrorism" and his repeated
assurances that the economy is basically sound when it is obviously in
the tank.
-
- This is not partisan carping either. While Bush failed
to carry Michigan in 2000, mid-Michigan is hardly a Democratic stronghold.
It is an area that voted solidly for our outgoing three-term Republican
governor, John Engler, and has consistently elected Republicans to Congress
and the state Legislature.
-
- Like most Americans elsewhere, people around here rallied
around the president and his War on Terrorism after the Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks on the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon. But serious questions
are now being raised as to the pace and scope of that war, and the effectiveness
of the steps taken thus far to make Americans more secure from terrorist
attacks.
-
- Despite all the hoopla about beefed up security at airports,
nothing much has changed except longer lines at airport security checkpoints
and random checks of passengers that most often single out women with children,
elderly couples and business travelers rather than suspicious-looking characters.
Apparently, the administration shies away from racial or ethnic profiling
at airports, but shows no inhibitions about wholesale national roundups
of Muslims and holding some of them indefinitely without charge.
-
- The disquieting thought is that our only new defense
against terrorists using planes as bombs is that U.S. fighter jets can
now be quickly scrambled to shoot down commercial airliners that have been
purportedly taken over by terrorists. This is not reassuring to frequent
flyers like me.
-
- Out here, Bush's rhetoric about Iran, Iraq and North
Korea as "the axis of evil" and his drumbeat for widening the
war by attacking Iraq sounds a bit hollow. Bush has already sent troops
to the Philippines, assisting in the long running war against communist
and Muslim rebels there, and is talking about joining forces in the Indonesian
government's fight against terrorists. But many experts contend that these
rebellions are indigenous and are not directly related to al Qaeda.
-
- What frightens people around here most of all is Bush's
obsession with expanding the war into Iraq, a move that our European allies,
except Great Britain, and all of the Arab countries strongly oppose. No
one doubts that Saddam Hussein is attempting to build an arsenal of weapons
of mass destruction. But the fact that he is surrounded by others who have
already developed such weapons, including Pakistan, India, Israel, China
and Russia, not to mention the nearby naval forces of the United States
and Great Britain, makes this presumed threat sound a bit feeble.
-
- So the War on Terrorism, which was such a political plus
to Bush a year ago, now threatens to become a liability. Meanwhile, the
stock market is in the sewer, the economy is shaky, unemployment is up,
job creation is down, and the federal budget has gone from surplus to deficit.
The predicted long string of budget surpluses that premised the multi-year
Bush tax cuts of 2001 have evaporated and we are now looking at red ink
federal budgets as far as the eye can see.
-
- The real test of the public's view of the Bush presidency
will come in November when the people who really count, the voters, go
to the polls to elect a new House and one-third of the Senate.
-
- And from here in the heartland, it looks as if the Democrats
will not only keep control of the Senate, but win control of the House
as well.
-
- -- James G. Wieghart is former Washington correspondent
and editor of the New York Daily News and former national political correspondent
for Scripps Howard Newspapers.
-
-
- http://www.thehill.com/issues/091802/op_ed_wieghart.shtm
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