Nearly one year after Election Day 2000 and two months after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, President Bush is experiencing the longest successive rally around a president since presidential approval rating polling was first conducted.
"Now for the seventh successive week he has been between 86 and 90 percent," politics professor Fred Greenstein said as he opened his "consumer reports" analysis of the Bush presidency in Dodds auditorium yesterday afternoon.
"This is a man, the 43rd President, about whom grave reservations have been or were raised before September 11," Greenstein said. The greatest changes resulting from the terrorist attacks that came just eight and a half months into Bush's presidency have come in his ability to discuss specifics and in his public communication skills, Greenstein said.
"I think lots of people have concluded that there has been genuine growth [since Sept. 11]," Greenstein said. "[His] motivation has just revved up enormously."
Greenstein systematically evaluated Bush through the six lenses he has used in his most recent book on leadership, "The Presidential Difference." He examined what he calls emotional intelligence, cognitive intelligence, political skill, policy sense, organization and communication skills.
Despite questions about Bush's emotional control stemming from his early drinking days, Greenstein said that following the New Hampshire primary, where he lost to Republican candidate Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz), Bush bounced back.
"One doesn't have to wake up in the middle of the night and say this man will send out nukes," Greenstein said. "He is at ease."
Greenstein said he felt that the terrorist attacks have made Bush, who had been characterized by the media as someone lacking in cognitive intelligence, "comfortably specific" on issues.
"I think Sept. 11 has galvanized this man," Greenstein said, referring to Bush's speeches in October. "He has a much closer sense of what is going on and is somebody much more on top of specifics."
Though he said that there was not a lot of change in Bush's political skill, Greenstein called the president a "natural politician" who had learned how to "work a room" in his youth.
Greenstein said he did not believe Bush is a "policy wonk," but that he was able to learn from his father's mistake by not expending the political capital garnered by the Gulf War. Bush came into office with clear goals and an ability to delegate.
Despite a presidential vision, Greenstein called Bush's early unease as a public communicator his "Achilles' larynx." However, Bush's speeches since the terrorist attacks show that he has improved as a communicator.
Greenstein predicted that Bush is "probably going to forget this notion that an effective administrator doesn't go into details."
Despite uncertainties clouding the war on terrorism and domestic economic pressures, Greenstein said the he felt there had been significant growth in Bush's presidency.
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