Kerry Spot    [ jim geraghty reporting ]
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Are the "red states" in jeopardy for Bush?

It's early, and polls can be deceiving. But right now, George W. Bush is in tough shape.

A CBS poll late last week found Bush's job-approval rating at 41 percent, the lowest of his presidency; 61 percent of respondents said they disapprove of his handling of Iraq and 65 percent believe the country is on the wrong track. The poll surveyed 1,113 adults (not likely voters, not registered voters), but a Gallup poll of 1,002 Americans conducted almost simultaneously showed similar disappointing news for the president.

The drop in poll numbers suggests that discontent has spread beyond typical Bush haters. A significant number of Independents and Republican-leaning, natural supporters of President Bush look to be seriously considering their Election Day options.

Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center of Politics, says that the reason for the dip is not so much that Americans want to give up on President Bush, as that they're ready to give up on the Iraqi people.

"I have seen the most massive defection from the president," Sabato tells NRO. "I'm struck by how many [people] are saying, 'This situation is hopeless.' Everybody says the same thing: 'They've been fighting for centuries, and after we leave, for centuries they will still be fighting.' They don't think that the Middle East will ever change. Some would call that thinking cynicism, and some people would call it realism."

Sabato says Americans supported taking out Saddam Hussein, and perceived him to be a threat to U.S. interests. But sorting out differences between Sunni and Shia, trying to stop car bombings in a country laden with old weapons, and being blamed for prison abuse from hypocritical Arab regimes and media are headaches they don't see as worth the trouble.

"Americans have lost their assurance that we have a course of action, that there's a plan here, that we're not improvising day by day," says Norman Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He adds that the goal of Bush's Monday-night address and future Iraq speeches is to convince Americans and the world that he, and the country, are not "prisoners of events."

What should be grabbing Karl Rove's attention is that neither Sabato nor Ornstein are drinkers of the John Kerry Kool-Aid. In fact, Sabato says the Democratic senator is a lousy candidate with "awful campaign skills."

"In a normal election year, the Democrats would have blown it by picking Kerry," Sabato says. "But this is not a normal election year. People are going to vote for the alternative regardless.... Right now, the average person doesn't know who Kerry is, and most won't really get to know who he is. All that many of them will say on Election Day is that, 'things are awful, so we had better take a chance on the new guy.' When you have challengers winning, it means voters are strongly rejecting the status quo, like in 1968 or 1980."

Bush's support on the war has been hammered by the prison photos and the non-stop doomsaying coming out of Iraq. But part of it may be that a significant segment of the natural Republican base has no appetite for nation building.

Historian Walter Russell Meade has written extensively about Andrew Jackson and his influence on American political thinking. In 1999, he wrote about the Jacksonians, who are, in many ways, a typical red-state voter:

Jacksonians believe that international life is and will remain both anarchic and violent. The United States must be vigilant and strongly armed.... At times, we must fight pre-emptive wars. There is absolutely nothing wrong with subverting foreign governments or assassinating foreign leaders whose bad intentions are clear. Thus, Jacksonians are more likely to tax political leaders with a failure to employ vigorous measures than to worry about the niceties of international law.

Meade explains that Jacksonians weren't big fans of intervening in Bosnia, because the national interest was vague, and they doubted that American soldiers should risk their lives to establish multicultural tolerance in the Balkans.

Jacksonians believe that neither Wilsonians nor Hamiltonians nor anybody else will ever succeed in building a peaceful world order, and that the only world order we are likely to get will be a bad one. No matter how much money we ship overseas, and no matter how cleverly the development bureaucrats spend it, it will not create peace on earth. Plans for universal disarmament and world courts of justice founder on the same rock of historical skepticism. Jacksonians just tend not to believe that any of these things will do much good....

The pattern of frontier warfare, in which factions in a particular tribe might renew hostilities in violation of an agreement, helped solidify the Jacksonian belief that there was no point in making or keeping treaties with "savages."

The Jacksonian response to the Fallujah savagery would have been a crushing, and perhaps indiscriminate, counterattack on the entire town. Upon hearing that American forces, after hammering Sadr's insurgents for days suddenly shifted and began negotiating with former Baathists to patrol the city, Jacksonians may have concluded that we're no longer in this to win.

Bush's task has to be to convince Americans that progress is within our grasp in Iraq and that we're not getting bogged down in Bosnia-style peacekeeping, or Somalia-style mission creep. This is what the 2004 election is going to be about, more than any other issue.

"Right now, the mood is, 'get our troops out of the line of fire," Sabato says. "Some people are worried about the treasure this is costing us, but they're mainly worried about the blood. The only thing on Bush's side is that it's May. If this was October, he would be toast."