Prof. Pollkatz: Bush Approval & the three Commander in Chief Moments

Stuart Eugene Thiel is a retired lawyer and economics professor (at least he taught at Wash. St and DePaul U’s) who comments around the blogosphere here and there. But to me he will always be Prof. Pollkatz proprietor of a really fantastic polling website with a concentration on Bush approval as aggregated from 15 national polls: Professor Pollkatz’s Poll of Polls Prof. Pollkatz graciously has made his graphics available for distribution as long as it is free, reproduced in its entirely and clearly shows his name. Conditions I think I met (certainly nobody is paying me for content here).

His work did a huge service to those of us who couldn’t figure out why the American people continued to support Bush. And the answer was that they really didn’t. Instead they rallied around the Commander in Chief at three separate points: 9/11, the Fall of the Statue (capture of Baghdad), and the capture of Saddam. At all intervals in between he lost approval at a steady rate. Prof. Pollkatz shows this with these two graphics (among others). I am having trouble getting the second one to load (the one that shows the spikes), so I’ll try to get it up in comments.

(Click on graphic to enlarge) This is really an amazing result. Bush never had any significant year over year improvement. He fractionally beat his previous number in a handful of shown sample points. But in total you can’t really quarell with Prof. Pollkatz’s caption.

Prof. Pollkatz shuttered his site on Nov. 8th with the signoff: “My work is finished. Farewell. We done good. Yes We DID.”

Well I can’t disagree with that. Consider this a lovely parting gift for the political genius Karl Rove. Nothing he did actually worked in any substantial way. His client bled support almost from beginning to end, numbers boosted by three events which were largely or totally out of either man’s control.