Hey W., We Need To Talk

So President Bush's Approval ratings are nearing a record low for a sitting U.S. President. That must be bad. Really bad. According to the PollingReport.com, which summarizes approval/disapproval surveys from a variety of nes sources, Bush's job approval ratings are hovering somewhere in the low 30s. Call it 33% for the sake of argument. Basically 2 out of 3 people claim that they disapprove of how well Bush is doing "his job." How tragic. It's like failing a test isn't it? I mean 100% is an "A", 60% is "Failing" so 33% must be abysmally, embarassingly bad, right? At least that's the impression we get from the news these days.

But I don't think it's quite fair. To be sure, the higher the approval rating the better. If President Bush had a 100% approval rating, it would be something to brag about. It's easy to see that the higher the approval rating the better. So why isn't it fair to lambast him when his approval rating is so low?

Sometimes I think it's legitimate to pin bad approval ratings on the President. Sometimes it's his own fault. You get caught in an intrigue to secretly record your political enemies and then illegally cover it up. You get caught data mining FBI files for dirt you can use against your political opponents. Fine. You deserve to be have approval numbers in the toilet.

But sometimes bad approval numbers can be out of your control. Sometimes it's impossible to have good approval numbers. Let's look at a hypothetical example:

Suppose a leader is faced with some tough issue and there are two courses of action he can take. In the best case scenario, The course of action is clear cut and _everyone_ can agree on the right course of action. In this case, it's easy for the leader to get a 100% approval rating. He just chooses the course of action that everyone agrees with. But there are at least two cases in which the President's approval rating to end up significantly less than 100%.

Suppose that two courses of action have roughly equal arguments for and against them. They each have their good points and each have their bad points. It's quite possible that the people who are voting on the leader's approval are themselves divided roughly equally. As illustrated below:




In this scenario, we can see that no matter which course of action the leader takes, approximately 50% of the people voting on his approval rating are going to disapprove and approximately 50% are going to approve. So on a 100% scale, the maximum approval rating the leader can hope to get is 50%.

The situation is even worse if there are multiple courses of action and the people are divided among all the different courses of action. In a scenario in which there are four courses of action and the people are legitimately divided among all four, then the best the leader can hope for is a 25% approval rating because 3/4 of the people are going to prefer their chosen course of action over the course of action the leader chose.




There's another scenario in which the leader's approval ratings can be terrible through no fault of his own. Suppose there are two courses of action and 98% of the people choose one option and 2% of the people favor another course of action. It would be easy for the leader to choose the more popular course of action and garner a 98% approval rating. But what if that course of action is just plain _wrong_? What if 98% of the people think the leader should go kick a dog and 2% of the people don't? Should the president go kick a dog just to get the 98% approval rating? Of course not.

So when we look at President Bush's low approval ratings, we have to keep in mind the following:

First, "rightness" and "popularity" are not always the same thing. We'd like to think they are We'd like to think that as a collective we'd choose the right paths more often than the wrong ones. But it's not automatically so. The opposite is true too of course. Sometimes it really is the leader that's out of step with what's right.

The second thing we have to keep in mind is that in the real world, there are often legitimate differences of opinion among good people about the right way to proceed and there are often situations in which it is simply impossible to get a broad consensus.

If 66 % of the those polled "disapprove" of the Presiden't course of action, it doesn't mean 66% of the population are all in agreement on the way they think the President ought to go. They may in fact be even more divided amongst themselves about the right way to go. And in fact, the 33% approval rating the President has may in fact be the best possible approval rating he could possibly hope for. Low approval ratings can also indicate a country that's deeply divided over the right way to proceed.

So is a low disapproval rating completely meaningless then? No. Far from it. I think it's very important and very significant. At very least, it's an indicator that the nation is divided about the right course of action to take.. It may be impossible to gain broad consensus on important but messy issues in the real world. And a good leader takes decisive action in the face of uncertainty. Sometimes circumstances are so urgent that there isn't time for debate on the right course of action. Sometimes there isn't time to build a broad course of action. But over the years of a Presidential term, there's no excuse for not engaging in a dialog with the people. That's what we're not seeing enough of from President Bush.

So in my opinion, an 33% approval rating might not necessariloy mean the President is doing a bad job, but it definitely means we need to talk.