If Bush's Approval Percentage Were a Stock Price

Only because he was chasing a girl who worked there, the Slangwhanger-in-Chief once spent a year as an interviewer on an economic research project in Texas. Although a confirmed artsie, subspecies English major, to him the process of finding out what and where small businesses and large bought and sold their inputs and outputs was a sufficient diversion for a while. Driving around east central Texas in a convertible didn't hurt none, neither. Only regret: didn't get to interview, or sample, at the Shiner brewery outside San Antonio. (Girl later became a lawyer. No regrets about missing that, though she was the first woman ths S-i-C ever proposed to while drunk. But not the last.)

In any case, at one time the S-i-C knew a number of economists. Now, alas for him though possibly not for them, they are all safely dead. He must therefore ask in public what once he could have sought in private: how would a genuine numbercrunching chartwatching economist or stock maven interpret the graph of Preznit Bush's precipitious popularity fall?

Of course no one would buy any stock in the thing. But how soon would you expect it to crater so far as to require becoming delisted from the exchange?

Simple straight-line projection seems to show him hitting Nixon territory (28% approval) sometime before the Vernal Equinox of 2006. (The first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox is always Easter -- except in Orthodox countries, some of which have been known to have two Easters in certain years. Western Christianity celebrates Easter on April 18 this cycle. The Preznit looks like he will have to be doing a lot more praying by then than he has yet; either that, or change what he is praying for to something actually attainable in this world.)

The adequate replacements for Ana Marie Cox at Wonkette have a great headline for this graph: Majority of Americans Hate America. Channelling Faux News pretty good, they are. The NY Times-generated graph appears to show that he will hit 15% approval about in time for the 2008 Presidential elections.

Certainly this Preznit will spend most of his last two years in office as the Most Unpopular President Since Martin VanBuren. It would be nice to remember which of the S-i-C's more prescient friends predicted, before the 2000 elections, that the Untreated Alcoholic Attention-Deficit Candidate could well be the end of the Republican Party...