POINT: Is Bush the right man to continue running the U.S.?

Week after week, new poll results come up, and week after week, support for the president continues to drop to new lows.

Less than three years after his inauguration as president of the United States, George W. Bush is less popular than he has ever been. According to recent data, Bush holds only a three-point lead against a democratic presidential candidate, if elections were to be held today, a virtual tie.

The question then becomes, how did approval ratings for a wartime president get to be so disturbingly low. Where many might point to a number of reasons, it might be beneficial here to explore one possibility: Presidential Attention Deficit Disorder (PADD). Almost all of the current woes that have befallen the U.S. domestic and foreign policy can be traced back to such a phenomenon.

From the early days of his administration, Bush displayed his lack of commitment to see things through. Surely, the administration would announce one project after the other, but it never moved beyond planning stages. And even when such projects came to fruition, lack of foresight and funding, would make them less effective than initially envisioned. Take for example the “No Child Left Behind Act” which congress approved and has been lauded as one of the administration’s greatest domestic achievements. By making the act a federal mandate, Bush left the states no choice but to implement it, which is a good thing.

At the same time, very little money was provided to the state governments to implement the decision, which made the situation worse, seeing that most of them were already incurring budget deficits. In addition to the lack of funding, no realistic solution was provided to help those states whose students were left with nowhere to go, because all the nearby schools failed the government tests and had to close down. Unable to come up with a meaningful solution, the administration impatiently looked abroad for some distraction from the dismal state of economy at home.

Having been left without much choice after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the United States rightfully went after the Taliban, which was sheltering and supporting al-Qaeda. After a mostly successful military campaign in Afghanistan, the reasonable thing to do was to completely eliminate the possibility of the return of Taliban in that country as well as finding and eliminating Osama bin Laden and his followers. Not so with this president.

Without yet consolidating the newly appointed Afghani government, the administration embarked on another dangerous and extremely harmful adventure: Iraq. While in the height of the conflict there, menacing words and gestures alerted other countries in the region and elsewhere that they might be the next targets of PADD. Both Iran and North Korea, who were classified as “axis of evil” members, together with Iraq, have currently accelerated their efforts to produce nuclear weapons.

So, what does the administration have to show after two years of war on terror? Not much, really, unless one counts the rising number of body bags coming home, increased threat and exposure to terrorist attacks, an unstable Afghanistan and Iraq, an underfunded Homeland Security agency, eroded civil liberties, a record budget deficit, and a negative image of the United States abroad. If Bush could muster the necessary courage to tackle real problems here at home rather than chase after mirages of a new world order, then current trend of his job approval ratings might be reversed. Since that is very unlikely, it is also highly unlikely that the American people will leave it up to the U.S. Supreme Court to handpick their president in November 2004.

Medlir Mema is a senior majoring in political science. Comments can be sent to medlirm@cc.usu.edu.