53% of Americans have unfavourable opinion of Bus

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Washington: The outgoing year saw US President George W Bush's popularity ratings decline throughout the year, and now a CNN/Gallup/USA Today poll shows that he enjoys only 46 per cent of popular support. 53 per cent of people have expressed unfavourable opinion of Bush. The latest poll shows that the First Lady Laura Bush comes out very much on top with nearly three out of four Americans--73 per cent-- saying they have a favourable opinion of her with only 13 per cent saying that they viewed her unfavourably. The Vice President Dick Cheney comes away with only a 41 per cent approval rating and an unfavourable score of 50 per cent; the Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld received favourable response from 42 per cent of respondents and unfavourably from 45 per cent of those surveyed. Bush's slide in 2005 has been attributed to any number of factors over and above the continuing mess in Iraq. The troubled situation in Iraq has pinned down the manoeuvrability of the White House with the result that the administration has made very little progress on such major domestic issues as re-vamping social security. And in the last four months the White House has been viewed as bungling on the response to Katrina hurricane and in the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, a name that had to be withdrawn.

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