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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
The great bafflement of next week's midterm congressional elections is that there is even a sliver of a hint of a shadow of a doubt about the outcome. The polls are unequivocal. In a mid-October NBC/Wall Street Journal survey, the public's "job approval" of the Republican Congress stood at a wan sixteen per cent, as against seventy-five per cent disapproving. Another measurement normally regarded as electorally predictive, the one pollsters call "right track/wrong track," is nearly as one-sided. In last week's Newsweek survey, twenty-five per cent of respondents pronounced themselves satisfied with "the way things are going in the United States at this time," while sixty-seven per cent registered dissatisfaction. The Newsweek poll also found that, by a 55-37 margin, likely voters generically prefer Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives to Republican ones. Those numbers are a near-mirror image of the same survey's job rating for President Bush: thirty-five per cent approve of his performance, fifty-seven per cent disapprove of it.
There's a lively debate among historians over the question of whether the record of the forty-third President, compiled with the indispensable help of a complaisant Congress, is the...
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