Bush's Dismal "Right Track/Wrong Track" Numbers

The most recent AP-Ipsos poll found that "[o]nly 28 percent say the country is headed in the right direction while two-thirds, 66 percent, say it is on the wrong track." This is similar to what the CBS poll found yesterday:

The public's concerns affect their view of the state of the country. Sixty-nine percent of Americans say things in the United States are pretty seriously off on the wrong track — the highest number since CBS News started asking the question in 1983. Today, just 26 percent say things are going in the right direction.

What's happening here, of course, is that Bush's base is starting to erode:

Evangelicals, Republican women, Southerners and other critical groups in President Bush's political coalition are increasingly worried about the direction the nation is headed and disappointed with his performance, an AP-Ipsos poll found.

Steve Soto at The Left Coaster sees it this way:

The base is having heartburn over the direction of the country, and the only way the GOP can turn that around is to move farther to the right, which is a given for the 2006 midterms. But the Miers nomination, the runaway spending, the emerging concerns even within the base about the war in Iraq all gang up to give Bush few options for keeping the base happy going into 2006 except to blame the blacks and immigrants and to make evangelicals feel like they are victims once again. Up until recently, I would have said that a war scare with Iran or Syria would do the trick also, and the rhetoric from Bush and Blair in the last couple of days seemed to signal such a campaign was coming. But this poll apparently showed that even Bush's base was souring on Iraq, so you wonder just how effective another diversionary war would be on his base.