President has few fans left in state

Minnesotans are profoundly dissatisfied with the job President Bush is doing -- and are even more disenchanted with the general trajectory of the nation.

A new Star Tribune Minnesota Poll found that only a quarter of the state's residents approve of the president's job performance, the harshest assessment of his tenure. Two-thirds give his performance a thumbs-down.

At the same time, only 14 percent of Minnesotans say things in the nation are generally headed in the right direction, while 77 percent say the United States has gotten seriously off on the wrong track.

That level of dissatisfaction also is higher than at any other time during the Bush presidency.

Those dismal assessments generally mirror the verdicts recently offered by Americans in national polls, and opinions about Bush and the nation's direction are closely bound to each other.

"Bush has run this country into the ground and needs to answer for a lot," said Dee Dee Paulson, 43, a bookkeeper who lives near Brainerd.

Like several other poll respondents contacted in follow-up interviews, Paulson said she has a hard time separating the nation's overall woes from what she sees as Bush's missteps.

On the other hand, Joe Willenbring, 50, a manufacturing foreman from Bloomington, is among those who believe that Bush is doing a good job and that the country is on the right track.

"He's done a good job by me, keeping my country safe," he said. "Since 9/11, the terrorists haven't come back at us the way they have other places.

"I'm still busy at my job and I'm not feeling any squeeze. My wife isn't, either. The economy hasn't hurt my family. I don't see all this bad stuff that gets thrown at us by the media."

Correlation on Bush, nation

The poll found a close correlation between attitudes about Bush and how the nation is doing: Of those Minnesotans who say the nation is on the wrong track, 90 percent also disapprove of Bush's performance. Those who say the nation is headed in the right direction rate the president slightly less harshly, with 33 percent giving him a thumbs-up.

The gloom among Minnesotans about Bush and the state of the nation is so pervasive that only by looking at party identification and those who say their personal finances are better than a year ago can you find groups with a more upbeat assessment than the state as a whole.

Republicans are three times more likely than Democrats and twice as likely as independents to say the United States is headed in the right direction. The partisan divide is even starker in evaluating Bush, with 58 percent of Republicans approving of the job he's doing, 30 percent disapproving. Only 7 percent of Democrats approve, while 90 percent do not.

Downward drift

Bush's popularity in Minnesota peaked shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and has drifted downward from 50 percent during the past five years.

His current approval rating is lower than any ever registered for his father, George H.W. Bush (32 percent); Bill Clinton (46 percent) or Ronald Reagan (45 percent). The lowest presidential approval rating ever measured by the Minnesota Poll was for Richard Nixon, when he hit 20 percent several months before his August 1974 resignation.

"None of the leadership in Washington has any backbone, we don't have a coherent foreign policy and it seems like America is degenerating to a point where nobody likes America anymore -- not even Americans," he said.

"I'm satisfied with the job Bush is trying to do, especially on the war on terrorism. That's about the only job he's doing well. But that's any president's only real job: protecting America. And he's my president whether I like it or not."

Staff researcher Roberta Hovde contributed to this report.