Unpopular

President Bush is not only the most unpopular president in modern history, he’s the most polarizing. Only 1% of the population is neutral or undecided about him.

A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Thursday indicates that 71 percent of the American public disapprove of how Bush is handling his job as president…

"Bush's approval rating, which stands at 28 percent in our new poll, remains better than the all-time lows set by Harry Truman and Richard Nixon [22 percent and 24 percent, respectively], but even those two presidents never got a disapproval rating in the 70s," [CNN polling director Keating] Holland said.

One person who views President Bush favorably is historian Paul Johnson.

After September 11th, he buckled down quickly to this unprecedented attack on America, determined that such a treacherous outrage should never occur again. Nor has it. It is worth inquiring why. There is no doubt that attacking the American homeland remains the prime objective of Muslim fundamentalist leaders. Yet they have not done so. One reason for this is the success of Mr. Bush's team in learning the lessons of Sept. 11 and building a security system of impressive strength and sensitivity.

Equally, if not more important, is the way in which Mr. Bush--partly by accident but mainly by design--has switched the war's theater of operations to the death-dealers' territory. The number of Muslim fanatics who have been killed by the Allies in their operations or who have killed each other in Sunni-Shia clashes must be reckoned in the hundreds of thousands. We must remember that every extremist killed in the suburbs of Basra or Baghdad or in the hills around Kabul or Kandahar means scores, perhaps hundreds, of Western civilian lives saved.

Future Paul Johnsons will assess whether this president’s unpopularity was deserved. But, as we wrote over two years ago , we don't have to wait to make this declaration: Mr. Bush is the most consequential president since Ronald Reagan. © 2008 Stephen Yuen