WASHINGTON -- Seldom if ever has a president received such bad news from a major public-opinion poll as Bill Clinton has learned from the latest survey by the Gallup organization for USA Today and CNN. It charts just how tall the mountain is that he must climb to win re-election in 1996.
The only encouraging measurement, if you can call it that, is that President Clinton after two years in office has a very slightly higher approval-disapproval ratio on how he is doing his job than Ronald Reagan had at the same point in his first term. The ratio is 42 percent favorable, 50 percent unfavorable for Clinton, compared with 41-50 for Reagan, bogged down at the time by a recession. But even that comparison is damning when you consider that the economy has thrived in Clinton's first two years.
Except Reagan, all seven other presidents before Clinton, going back to Dwight D. Eisenhower, had positive favorable-unfavorable ratings at this juncture, with John F. Kennedy at an astounding 76-13 ratio, and even the beleaguered Jimmy Carter in 1978 was at 50-34.
Other numbers in the poll are equally depressing for Clinton. Asked whether he was doing a better or worse job than they expected, 53 percent said worse, to only 29 percent who said better. Fully half of all those surveyed called his presidency a failure, to 44 percent who called it a success. And on every one of eight major issues listed, Republican Party leaders were given higher grades than the Democratic president.
Even in the two areas in which Clinton has had demonstrable achievements, he got poorer marks. Of those polled, 50 percent said the GOP leaders would handle the economy and deficit reduction better than Clinton, who scored only 40 percent on dealing with the economy and 34 percent with deficit reduction, which was the centerpiece accomplishment of his first two years.
In projected presidential races in 1996, the poll found that voters surveyed favored an unnamed Republican over him by 53-40 in a two-way race and by 41-37 in a three-way race in which Ross Perot also ran, with 18 percent favoring Perot. With Jesse Jackson as the third candidate, 49 percent said they would favor the Republican to 38 for Clinton and 10 for Jackson. And in a four-way race with both Perot and Jackson in, the Republican would be favored by 40 percent to 35 for Clinton, 14 for Perot and 8 for Jackson.
It's true that polls that list unnamed candidates aren't very reliable in projecting how an actual election will turn out involving specific contestants. Such surveys naturally enable voters to express their displeasure with the devil they know. Once a specific opponent is identified, his or her warts become part of the equation, and that displeasure may be tempered. But it's abundantly clear that such displeasure is widespread today.
The USA Today/CNN poll is echoed by another just released by the Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press. It has Clinton being beaten, 40-33, by an unnamed Republican and even worse news for him: Two-thirds of all Democrats surveyed say they want him challenged for the Democratic nomination in 1996.
The Times Mirror poll underscores the lack of public confidence in Clinton in its finding that 43 percent want the Republican leadership in Congress to take the lead in solving the country's problems, to only 39 percent who favor the president continuing in this traditional role.
One possible silver lining for Clinton in that cloud is the suggestion that voters will hold the Republican majority in Congress to account for failures in problem-solving over the next two years, provided the president and his party do not allow themselves to be painted as naked obstructionists.
The president does not need such polls to tell him his political future is dark. The Nov. 8 election results emphatically informed him of that fact. But there is a sense in these latest numbers that voters have made up their minds in a negative way about him, as they clearly hadn't about Reagan when his job approval was so low in 1982. If that is so, the task of rebounding will be much harder than it would be if voters were reserving judgment.