Pelican Parts Forums - Rhode Island -- "Small But Smart" (political)

From my local newspaper today :)

Bob Kerr: Rhode Island leads the nation where it counts

01:00 AM EDT on Friday, August 18, 2006

Stand up, Rhode Islanders. Stand up and stand tall. You have moved to the top of the national heap.

You've got George W. Bush's number. And that number is . . . 22.

Yup, that's the percentage of Rhode Islanders who approve of the president's job performance in a recent poll by SurveyUSA. It's the lowest rating of all 50 states. And in this case, the lowest is the highest.

Print those bumper stickers now: Rhode Island -- Small But Smart.

But before hailing the 78 percent who have shown such keen insight and a firm grasp of the obvious, let us think about that 22 percent. Let us think about those who look at this man, who repeatedly walks out on the world stage and makes us cringe, and say "this is the man I want holding the future of the free world in his hands."

Who could they be? Have they been away? Have they been confined in places where, along with restricted access to sharp objects, they are not allowed to read a newspaper, watch TV or listen to the radio?

OK, so you could excuse some people for surrendering to that reckless, cowboy charm in the early days, even though the cowboy part is about as legitimate as a 4-year-old riding a coin-fed bronco outside a drugstore.

You could sort of understand why some people, desperate for national supremacy and not too keen on heavy debate, would want a plainspoken, aw-shucks kind of guy confronting the devils of world terrorism, even though the plainspoken part has been found to be a nice way of saying "not the sharpest knife in the drawer."

But people learn, don't they? They watch, they listen? Some people in East Greenwich even went so far as to publicly admit that they had not voted wisely. They put a sign in their front yard, apologizing for voting for "The Moron."

Just this past Tuesday night, Joe Scarborough, hardly your resident media lefty, addressed the question "Is George Bush An Idiot?" on his show on MSNBC. Scarborough pointed out that the question is being asked more and more around the world and should be confronted. Then he ran a series of clips in which the president said things that were so painfully inept, embarrassing and idiotic that they seemed like some kind of presidential spoof. Except they weren't.

So let's try to find that 22 percent and bring them around -- run some footage from the Iraqi civil war, read some quotes, replay that stunning food-spitting, back-rubbing double feature from the last G-8 Summit.

Let's see if we can get that approval rating down to single digits and tell the rest of the country that Rhode Island is a place where you don't have to hit people upside the head with a tire iron to convince them there is a very scary man running the country.

Because this isn't going to get better. There are more than two years left of this dark White House folly, and George W. Bush is not a guy who's going to face up to disaster and turn it around.

So take a bow, Rhode Island. You have seen the truth behind the spin. You have led the nation in putting the proper numbers on a bumbling presidency.

If you want to know what state is on the other end of the survey, it's Utah, where people gave the president a whopping 59 percent approval rating.

So if you were considering a vacation on the arid shores of the Great Salt Lake, with the sounds of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir floating from the tape deck in the RV, you might want to reconsider.

Think about something in the Green Mountains of Vermont. Vermonters gave the president a 27 percent approval rating.