I’ve made this point before, but it seems I have to point it out almost continually. Glenn discusses Bush’s current (relatively) low approval rating. This number is, to me, almost always politically meaningless, though the pundits always want to freight it with inappropriately great import. The underlying thesis, of course, is that since the president’s approval ratings are low, this somehow represents a great opportunity for the Democrats, and that if only the numbers had been like this back in the fall, John Kerry would have been swept into office.

Nonsense.

It may be an opportunity for some theoretical Democrat party–one to which I might even in that bizarro universe belong, and for whose candidates I’d vote. But not in this universe, not with Moveon.org, and Howard Dean, and Ted Kennedy continuing to call the shots. The mindless assumption that unhappiness with one major party translates into happiness with the other continues to pervade the conventional wisdom, but consider:

I was very happy that Al Gore was not elected president in 2000. Ecstatically, almost deliriously happy. And this was even before September 11–that event just made me all the more relieved. But on any day of the Bush presidency since he took the oath of office, if you’d asked me if I approve his performance, I’d say no. On free trade, on government spending, on education, on his faux support for the “assault-weapons” ban, on any number of things, I strongly disagree with his stances and disapprove of his presidency. But since I’m not offered anything better from the other party, this is meaningless in terms of his theoretical electoral prospects, or even in terms of his getting my support on initiatives with which I agree.

Since the conventional wisdom is that Bush is a “conservative” and a “right winger” (though if a Donkey president had pushed through many of the things that this president has, e.g., the education bill co-developed with Ted Kennedy, or the huge Medicare enlargement via the prescription drug benefit, the press and the Democrats would be praising him and them to the skies), then the assumption is that unhappiness with him is unhappiness with the “conservativeness” and “right-winginess” of his proposals, and that the solution to improving his “approval” rating is to “move to the center.” The explanation rarely seems to take into account that the unhappiness may be due to lack of diligence in executing his “right-wing” proposals, or that in fact (as was the case with, for example, the education bill, or steel tariffs), they aren’t “right-wing” at all. The fact that many libertarians’ and self-identifying conservatives’ unhappiness might be dragging down his numbers never seems to occur to these people.

Of course, that might be one of the reasons that their electoral prognostications often turn out to be so wrong…