Karen Tumulty
June 14, 2005

Karen Tumulty is TIME's National Political Correspondent based out of Washington DC, where she covers national political developments for the magazine. (Read Karen Tumulty's bio)

Q: How is President Bush's job approval rating compared to former presidents in their second terms? Are there signs showing that the administration is worried about the numbers and may change its approach to some domestic issues, such as Social Security and economy?

Second-term Presidents usually find it tough slogging in the polls. Virtually every poll you see these days shows more people expressing disapproval of the job that President Bush is doing than saying they like it. However, the decline is not particularly dramatic in comparison with where he has been over the past year or so. Don't forget: Bush won re-election with his job approval numbers hovering around 50 percent.

What has to be worrying the White House more at this point is the public's opinion of where the country is. Everywhere you look, you see anxiety -- about jobs, gasoline prices and particularly the policy in Iraq, where the violence continues. Last week saw what could be a real turning point, in which a majority of Americans said that the war in Iraq has not made us safer. That goes right to the President's greatest political strength, his leadership on foreign policy, and could affect the amount of capital he has to push even his domestic agenda, which is an ambitious one for a president in his final term.

Meanwhile, his major domestic initiative, adding private accounts to Social Security, simply isn't selling, despite the White House's high-profile campaign to build public support. So they have adjusted their strategy here and there. We have already seen that Bush is putting more emphasis on making the system solvent, and he is entertaining the idea of making it less generous to the wealthy. Despite the shifts, the president is still clinging to that central idea of creating private accounts. However, it is not finding many takers, even among the Republicans on Capitol Hill, so it is getting harder and harder to see how he will get this done.

Q: What are the reasons behind the public's discontent with the lawmakers? Which party suffers more from the low approval rating?

Congress tends to do well in the polls when people see it getting things done. It hit very high levels of public approval in the days after 9/11, when Republicans and Democrats put aside partisanship and worked together in a way that the country had not seen in a very long time.

It's not just gridlock that is the problem, but the fact that people see Congress tying itself into knots over things that don't rank near the top of most voters' concerns -- such as the Terry Schiavo case, and the question of whether to change the rules surrounding filibusters. These are both instances that show how the intensity of feeling these days among the most partisan elements in each party is pulling policymakers farther and farther away from the priorities that most people care about.

Neither party looks particularly good right now, but with Republicans in charge of both houses, they are the ones who have the most to worry about. The numbers are starting to look very much the way they did in 1994, which was when voters threw out the Democratic majorities of both houses. Nor does it help that questions are being raised about whether some lawmakers have been living the high life, with lobbyists flying them to vacation destinations around the globe.

Q: What's on the Congress's agenda before the summer recession? What are the prospects for those initiatives?

Watch the energy bill in the Senate. Leaders there very much want to prove they can get something done, and there are few issues on the agenda right now that are of more concern than rising gasoline prices. However, the big story of the summer is likely to be a vacancy on the Supreme Court, which will really test how well the newly empowered centrists of the Senate can hold together.

Q: Why isn't the House Ethics Committee making any progress on the Tom DeLay investigation? What's holding them up?

The ethics committee has been unable to function all year. Right now, the question is a dispute over staffing -- in essence, whether the Republican Chairman should be allowed to hire his choice of senior staffers, or whether they should be chosen with a bipartisan or non-partisan consensus.

My hunch is that this will be settled fairly soon, because with so many members' activities now under question, the House very badly needs to say it has a process in place for dealing with these issues.

Q: Does Howard Dean still enjoy enough support from the Democratic party to keep his job? Has he been an effective fundraiser?

For now, he does. His recent comments have caused no small amount of heartburn among the Democratic insiders in Washington, but they never did like the idea of Dean as chairman. He still commands strong support among state party chairmen, because he is giving them more attention and money than they have seen in a very long time. And the party's liberal base likes his passion.

However, a party chairman's primary job is raising money, and people will be watching the next round of fundraising reports, due out on June 30. Dean seems to be doing fairly well compared with previous years, but some point out that his predecessor Terry McAuliffe left him with a much larger list of donors to work from, so the job shouldn't be that hard. Meanwhile, the Republicans are raising roughly twice as much as the Democrats.