The Iraq disaster undermines the Republicans but will not in itself bring party realignment. Rather, the energizing momentum is economic--and it is driven by abiding public anxiety here in America. Ahead in Washington are the sharpest kinds of party divisions over domestic policy. The signals are everywhere. The new Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, began by mobilizing all 233 Democrats to co-sponsor the minimum-wage bill. On their first opportunity to decamp, eighty-two Republicans did so. The final tally--an early harbinger of the realigned future--was 315 to 116. After redistricting in response to the 2010 census, it does not seem out of line to envision something approaching a Democratic margin of 275 to 160. The path to these numbers travels through Social Security, the issue that, as Bush has already experienced, remains the third rail of American politics. Debate before the 2008 election should produce the first of many win-win options for the Democrats: Either enough GOP senators defect to protect themselves as well as Social Security, or they don't defect and boost their own vulnerability at the polls. Of forty-nine GOP-held Senate seats, twenty-one are up for grabs. 

Beyond Social Security lies a decisive second issue: healthcare. A tangible start has already begun with the bill to end one of the greatest boondoggles in legislative history--the GOP ban on the government's right to negotiate prices with drug companies. It passed the House 255 to 170. With the drug lobby weighing in, Democratic partisans were pleased to see that all the no votes were cast by Republicans. More suggestive is the fact that a score of others broke ranks to support the Democrats--a move that reflects less an alteration of ideology than anxiety about surviving 2008. This will be a dicey time because by then Americans will know how much of their own family budgets and the nation's Treasury the Republican Party has brazenly transferred to pharmaceutical firms. Already put away in the House bank is the most important labor bill in a generation: the Employee Free Choice Act, designed to end the corporate reign of threats and job firings routinely visited upon all those trying to get a union at their workplace. The bill passed 241 to 185.

President George Bush's quarterly approval rating, for his 25th quarter in office, has reached a new low. According to a USA Today / Gallop Poll [sic], only 35 percent of Americans approve of the job President Bush is doing in the Oval Office.  

During the quarter, his rating ranged from 38 to 32 percent, with the average coming to it's newest low.  

According to the results, the President is down from the 70 percent approval rating he enjoyed at the end of 2001, and still below his 2006 quarterly average low of 36.  

Gallup Poll has been doing quarterly averages since 1945. Historically, President Bush's 35 percent comes in at 228 out of 246.