They take polls... unfortunately for BushCo

The NYTimes has the results of the latest New York Times/CBS News poll and... it ain't pretty for the Republicans. That's consistent with the results from the Newsweek poll I wrote about on Saturday. For example...

Seventy-nine percent of respondents said House Republican leaders were more concerned about their political standing than about the safety of teenage Congressional pages. About half of respondents said that the House Republican leadership had handled the Foley case improperly, compared with 27 percent who said they approved of how it was handled; 46 percent of respondents said Speaker J. Dennis Hastert should step down. And Americans -- including women and suburbanites --— are more likely to say that Democrats, and not Republicans, share their moral values.

[...]

The public's view of Iraq is as dark as it has been since the war began in 2003: two-thirds said the war was going somewhat or very badly, while only 3 percent said it was going very well. Two-thirds said they disapprove of how Mr. Bush is handling Iraq.

Mr. Bush'’s job approval has slipped to 34 percent, one of the lowest levels of his presidency, posing a complication for the White House as it seeks to send him out on the road to rally the Republican base voters. Mr. Bush'’s job approval rating has even slipped with his base: 75 percent of conservative Republicans approve of the way he has handled his job, compared with 96 percent in November 2004.

Mr. Bush clearly faces constraints as he seeks to address the public concerns about Iraq that have shrouded this midterm election: 83 percent of respondents thought that Mr. Bush was either hiding something or mostly lying when he discussed how the war in Iraq was going. Fifty-seven percent of respondents said Mr. Bush was personally aware of pre-9/11 intelligence reports that warned of possible domestic terrorist attacks using airplanes. When the same question was asked in May 2002, 41 percent said they believed Mr. Bush was aware.

[...]

And in a month in which Republicans have sought to discredit Democratic challengers as advocates of big spending and high taxes, 52 percent of respondents said Democrats would make the right decisions on how to spend taxpayers'’ money; 29 percent said Republicans would.