After the credibility gap comes the intensity gap, courtesy of the opinion pollsters who have found yet another way to sell their statistics. This one, based on the difference between the questions "strongly agree" or "somewhat agree," seems quite useful. In the mid-term elections of 2002 and the presidential election of 2004, the Republicans benefited from the large numbers of supporters who said, in the patriotic fervour that followed 9/11, that they strongly supported the president. This gave Bush a powerful cohort of committed voters, while the Democrats were stuck with more of the "somewhat agrees." But now the intensity gap is working against Bush. The latest LA Times poll finds 43 per cent of voters who "strongly disapprove" of Bush's performance, more than double the 19 per cent who "strongly approve." Worse still, Bush now generates more "strongly disapprove" opponents than the "strongly approve" and "somewhat approve" supporters combined, who muster a measly 38 per cent. What this implies is a large turnout of voters determined to vote against Bush and a much less enthusiastic turnout of his supporters, which helps to explain the growing panic among Republicans that they are going to lose control of one or both houses of congress in November.
Trent Lott's revenge
Bush is fast becoming a very lame duck, with little authority over his own party in congress. They already overruled his attempt to block John McCain's amendment banning the use of torture, his latest budget is dead on arrival, and now they have rebelled against his premature approval of the United Arab Emirates group, Dubai Ports World, buying P&O's six container ports in the US. For Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, who had to resign his Senate leadership post when the White House refused to back him after an incautious remark that suggested a certain nostalgia for the good old days of segregation in the deep south, it was payback time. His reaction to Bush's threat to veto legislation that would have blocked the port deal was "OK, big boy, I'll just vote to override your veto."
Dick Cheney to go?
Senior Republicans in congress are discussing the prospect of Dick Cheney stepping down after the mid-term elections, and thus allowing Bush to pick a replacement who would then become the man (or in Condi's case the woman) to beat for the party's presidential nomination in 2008. The idea is gathering steam as the bumper stickers advertising Cheney's latest shooting accident start to appear. The almost genial "Duck—it's Dick" seems the most popular in Washington, followed by "Support Our Troops—Send Dick Instead." But Cheney, whose approval ratings are at a dismally low 18 per cent, may be becoming a liability. Some Cheney staffers are already leaving the sinking ship. His top media adviser, Steve Schmidt, has left to run the re-election campaign of California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. And beyond the hunting accident, the real Republican concern is that Cheney's former chief of staff, Scooter Libby, is basing his defence against criminal charges of revealing confidential information on the claim that unnamed "superiors" told him to leak the content of a national intelligence estimate on Iraq to reporters in July 2003.
An even bigger Pentagon
If you thought the Pentagon was a behemoth, just wait to see what Don Rumsfeld and former speaker Newt Gingrich are planning. Late last year Newt, who fancies himself as a strategic thinker, sent Rummy a policy paper that proposed merging the Pentagon, state department, CIA and other intelligence branches into one giant department of national security. Rummy loved it. "Only by presenting the national security system as a single system can congress begin to understand that an effective foreign service may be as important as an effective training programme for the military," Newt wrote. And in a phrase calculated to delight Rumsfeld, who has been deeply frustrated by the ponderous ways of the Pentagon bureaucracy and its powers of resistance, Newt wants "entrepreneurial public management and modern information systems to modernise the government into a system compatible with the speed, agility, flexibility and efficiency of modern global companies."
Ken Livingstone might be alarmed to learn that Gingrich, in his plan to fight "the long war" against terror, says the US military must find ways "to ensure peace and stability in places like Baghdad, Gaza and London with exponentially greater intelligence and urban warfare skills… We need to see dominating the urban battle space as comparable to dominating the air or dominating the sea."
Berlusconi flops
Silvio Berlusconi's March address to the joint houses of congress was an embarrassing affair. Even though every congressman and senator was given extra tickets (for Italian-American constituents), the audience was so thin that the whips of both parties sent out panic messages to fill the gaping ranks of empty seats with staffers and interns. Berlusconi's faltering command of English and frequent bursts of Italian did not help, particularly when the printed translations prepared by the Italian embassy bore little resemblance to his spirited rhetoric.
