WASHINGTON – With President Bush’s poll numbers mired in the mid-30s on the third anniversary of the war in Iraq, some Republicans are running away from the increasingly unpopular chief executive as midterm elections approach, while Democrats gleefully count down the thousand days left in his presidency.

Despite his campaign in 2000 as a “uniter, not a divider,” President Bush has been a polarizing figure since reaching the White House. What is different in his difficult second term is that criticism of the president no longer breaks neatly down along partisan lines.

Almost two-thirds of Americans currently disapprove of the job he is doing in office. Compare that to the 51.3% of registered voters who cast the ballot for him in November 2004.

President Bush’s picture does not improve compared to Gallup Polls for other presidents in the spring of their second year of their second terms.

In March of 1998, in the first flowering of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, President Clinton maintained a 65% job approval rating. Americans may have been disgusted by President Clinton’s personal behavior but they simultaneously approved of his centrist political leadership, especially against the backdrop of the Internet boom.

Ronald Reagan in March of 1986 had a healthy 63% approval rating. While he would see his numbers dip to the mid 40s at the height of the Iran-Contra scandal a year later, President Reagan remained an affable American father figure.

The only president to score worse than the current President Bush was Richard Nixon who, in March 1974, five months before his resignation in disgrace over Watergate, scored a 27% approval rating.

In March of 1966, with the Vietnam War escalating, Lyndon Johnson still maintained a 58% approval rating, identical to President Eisenhower in March of 1958.

The President who most resembles President Bush at this point in his term is Harry Truman, who in March of 1950 scored an identical 37% support on the Gallup Poll, the month after Senator Joe McCarthy announced the infiltration of the State Department by communists, in the aftermath of the fall of China and on the eve of the outbreak of the Korean War. Truman soldiered through the travails of his second term, and while suffering low poll numbers, is today regarded as among America’s greatest and most beloved presidents. His combination of folksiness and geopolitical steadfastness in a time of dramatic change may give Bush advisers reason for optimism as they look toward history’s vindication.

But other explanations that are used to rationalize the President’s current unpopularity are less persuasive. For example, there are many who attribute President Bush’s current unpopularity to the war in Iraq, but it is not merely war fatigue that accounts for uncertainty about the nation’s executive leadership. Three years after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was celebrating his fourth consecutive reelection, while 86% of Americans in a Gallup poll said that there was “no chance” that we would lose the war in Europe. Three years into the conflict in Korea, President Eisenhower’s approval rating stood at 68%.

Likewise, some people point to the economy as an all-encompassing explanation for a president’s fortunes. But as President Bush explained in press conference this week, America’s economy is quite healthy, with 3.5% growth, 4.8% unemployment – lower than the average in 1970s, 1980s or 1990s – while 5 million new jobs outpaces Japan and the EU combined. President Bush’s poll numbers have dipped sharpest at the same time that the stock market has hit its highest levels since September 11th.

The problem of perceptions of the president would then appear to be different than the broader issues of war and peace and prosperity. Instead, the problem stems from a widening political credibility gap that can be seen in the growing chorus of criticism of President Bush from unlikely quarters. The Gallup poll has shown that the steepest loss in support for the president since his reelection has come from independents and moderate Republicans.

Indeed independents and moderates – who initially supported the president after his election at levels consistently around 55%, and near 90% in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks – now show something between disregard and active dislike for President Bush, with his support plummeting to 27% for independents and 31% among moderates.

The president’s anemic support among these bellwether groups is evidence of his failure to solidify broad popularity beyond his base. Now influential members of the Republican base are expressing displeasure with the president’s policies as well.

Noted conservative economist and sometime columnist Bruce Bartlett recently published a polemic against the president titled “The Imposter” in which he criticized the White House and the Republican Congress’s combined abandonment of fiscal conservatism.

This week, former Nixon aide Kevin Phillips – the analytic prophet of 1969’s “The Emerging Republican Majority” – published a new critique of the emerged Republican majority titled “American Theocracy.” Phillips focuses on the influence of religious right, the generational irresponsibility of deficit spending, and the powerful pull of oil interests on American foreign policy. 875 2174 982 2185While Phillips has never been a great fan of the Bush family – criticizing what he sees as corporate cronyism – this original Republican revolutionary’s newest attack indicates the extent to which the current Bush administration has lost the once party faithful.

In recent weeks, none other than capital markets-icon, Ayn Rand-fan and Reagan-appointed Fed Chair Alan Greenspan made news in a speech and book proposal reported by the Wall Street Journal in which he said that political parties in America were controlled by comparative extremes out of touch with the centrist instincts of most Americans. Mr. Greenspan said that it might be time for an independent president to transcend the political polarization and help return the country to a path of fiscal responsibility.

Perhaps the most surprising criticism has come from the former Supreme Court Justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, the Arizona Republican and Reagan appointee regarded as a centrist swing vote on the Rehnquist court. In a speech at Georgetown University, reported by National Public Radio’s Nina Totenberg on March 10th, O’Connor offered a stern lecture on what she sees as the dangerous influences of hyper-partisan Republicans on an independent judiciary. Through anecdotes that reach back to the Terri Schiavo case and “Justice Sunday,” O’Connor singled out two of the most prominent Texas Republicans of the Bush era – Senator Cornyn and the indicted former House majority leader, Tom DeLay – for comments excoriating the allegedly liberal judiciary. “I am against judicial reforms driven by nakedly partisan reasoning,” Ms. Totenberg quoted Justice O’Connor as saying.

Like many strong leaders, President Bush is not known for his capacity for self-doubt, but denial is not a virtue either. Short term reactions to the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina aside, President Bush’s current unpopularity is rooted in his policies and his partisan approach to governing since reaching the White House.

President Bush often speaks of his desire to find “bipartisan solutions” and “put aside partisan politics,” as he did most recently calling for entitlement reform in his State of the Union address. And while we must assume that the president’s statements are made in good faith, many of his political allies have pursued a more hardball partisan agenda with Mr. Bush’s apparent approval, leading to the credibility gap evident in his shrinking base of political support.

With the nation engaged in a war against terror with no end in sight, we could use more of the “Uniter, Not a Divider” President Bush promised to be when he first applied for the job. That might prove to be his best chance at improving his short-term poll numbers – and his long-term legacy – during his last one thousand days in office.