Jackson Free Press

In Salon this week, economist James K. Galbraith challenges the conventional notion that the relvelations of torture and prisoner abuse in Iraq have caused Bush's current record dip in the polls. He makes a case that the decline has been steady over some time: "The four-month decline is a bit higher on average than Bush's long-run downward trend. But it is not much higher. It is not enough higher to show that anything exceptional has happened. In particular, February's decline is not significantly greater than normal. And May's decline is within the normal range of 0.6 percent, give or take, around the standard minus 1.6 percent -- the 95 percent confidence interval. This suggests that Abu Ghraib has not had any special effect on public opinion. Not yet, anyway.

[ ...] "Things could still change. They could change if Bush fires Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld -- or even Vice President Cheney -- and remakes his government over the summer. There is talk of a possible al-Qaida attack on the Olympics in Athens. There is talk of terror at the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. And, of course, there is continuing chatter about the capture of Osama bin Laden. Whether any of these will happen, and how they will play, no one knows.

"But the numbers so far suggest that the underlying political reality may be rooted in something else: that the public isn't paying that much attention, at least to the daily news -- or to the advertising. Instead, Americans could be coming to a deeper judgment on Bush -- perhaps about his competence, or trustworthiness, or character. And we could be coming to that judgment as a whole people. It could be that we are not irrevocably divided down the middle between blues and reds. Maybe some of us just take a bit longer than others to think things through. [...]"