On Tue, 2002-09-17 at 08:13, Patrik Marxer wrote: > To be honest, we don't like bush much over here. I guess not many in europe > do. In the rest of the world it may be similar. In fact he is the most > unpopular leader in the world, as I have heard - even more unpopular than > Saddam Hussein.
Interestingly, my Government commissioned one of its innumerable private polls on this issue; the results were, very unusually, never released, and the general suspicion was that this was because they were extremely unfavourable to the current President. A problem which the USA has (but might not realise it has) is that its presidents are frequently perceived to be intellectually weak; Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George W Bush are good recent examples. Prima facie this cannot be true - it would be extremely unlikely that such a person could get to the top and stay there - but the _perception_ that it is true is dangerous. (Certainly, in the United Kingdom, nobody would consider even the less successful Prime Ministers of recent times, such as Jim Callaghan and John Major, to be stupid; in fact, both went from the bottom to the top by their own efforts, and history is being kinder to the first as time passes). Alastair
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