The Idiot Rating

I’ve been pondering this poll where people are asked if they approve or disapprove of some political figure, say the president. The statistic you get from this poll is the approval rating. Bush, we have been told, is at an all-time low for presidents since the poll began, at around thirty percent. (That’s amazing, really, to consider that almost a third of all American still think he’s doing a good job. Who are these people? Rubes!) Actually, you can go to Real Clear Politics and find out that the average of all polls measuring whether people approve or disapprove of the job Bush is doing is 30.08% approval and 65.2% disapproval.

What has intrigued me is the use of the word “approval.” This is something that parents say about their children. Say my son blows by his allotted text messages of 200 and ends up using 5,749. (Just a hypothetical example.) What do I tell him? That he’s a f------- idiot? Not if I’m a good Dad. No, I tell him I disapprove of his lack of discipline and take his phone away for the rest of the month. When I use this approval/disapproval metric, I can measure the quality of his behavior, or his job performance as an adolescent, and still show that I love him. Our relationship is still sound. Neither one of us will disown the other, or use poison.

But why use the same metric for a president? “Mr. Bush, we think you’re doing a bad job, but we still love you.” I don’t think so. I think it’s time to be honest. We should have a poll that asks people if they think Bush is an idiot. Just imagine being approached on the street by a straight-laced poll-taker and have her ask, “Do you believe President Bush is an idiot, or not an idiot?” Some people might call this push-polling, where you are trying to plant an idea in the subject’s mind. But to counter that charge, you can have another question where you ask, “Do you believe President Bush is a genius or not a genius?”

Now we’re dealing with some effective polling that might have consequences. By disapproving of Bush’s job performance, we’re not calling into question his legitimacy, because we’re still implying that we love him. But if over half the American public think he is an idiot, then he has to deal with that—maybe take some night courses or something. Just imagine a journalist asking Bush during a press conference, “President Bush, how do you deal with the fact that 63% of the public think that you are an idiot?”

Of course the main-stream polling outfits can’t actually ask this question. But some of the more radical ones can, or perhaps John Stewart of the Daily Show. That’s whom I’m directing this post at, really. I want the Daily Show to start polling the public with questions that people can readily understand and respond to honestly. The other question I think we should ask is, “Is President Bush a liar, or not a liar.”

And to just put my money where my mouth is, on my next teaching evaluation I’m going to have a question, on a scale of 1-5, “Is the professor an idiot?”