Second-term blues: recently Present Bush has suffered one blow after another.

• Author: Smith, Patricia
• Position: Cover Story

For the past couple of months, George W. Bush seems to have been in a Murphy's Law period of his presidency: Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong. First, there was the White House's disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina in August. Then, soaring gas prices. The failed Supreme Court nomination of Harriet E. Miers. The criminal indictment of a senior White House aide. And all the while, the number of American in late October.

And so a President whose approval ratings were above 60 percent for much of his first term, suddenly finds himself, less than a year after the start of his second term, with fewer than 40 percent of Americans saying he's doing a good job. (See graph, above.)

"Now we're going to find out the resilience of this White House," says David Winston, a Republican pollster. "There's no question this is the single most-difficult moment in public opinion that this White House has faced in office."

The President--and the nation face important challenges, and Bush's sagging poll numbers may make it even more difficult to get things done in Washington. Bush had an ambitious second-term agenda, including the partial privatization of Social Security and a new national energy policy. But with the White House struggling just to keep afloat through what seems like one crisis after another, analysts say that many of Bush's plans are now in question.

A SERIES OF CRISES

Low poll numbers do indeed affect a President's ability to implement his agenda, says Brandice Canes-Wrone, a presidential scholar at Princeton University. Many government initiatives--Social Security reform, for example involve complex concepts that many Americans either don't understand or haven't formed strong opinions about. "If you don't think the President is doing a good job in general," she says, "the last thing you're going to do is give him the benefit of the doubt on this complicated reform proposal."

Low approval ratings can also diminish a President's clout with world leaders, says Stephen Hess, a professor of public affairs at George Washington University. And they can give him less clout with Congress. "The President's falling ratings give the opposition leader greater leeway to attack," Hess says, "and with the distribution between majority and minority so slim on Capitol Hill, anything can lead to gridlock."

The Bush administration has been besieged in the last few months by a series of crises, all of which seem to have affected the President's popularity. They include:

Response to Hurricane Katrina. The administration is widely perceived as having fumbled the initial response to the disaster in New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast. The TV images of thousands of mostly black and poor people stranded in the flooded city without food and water shocked Americans, with many blaming Bush and the the federal government.

Gas prices. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, gasoline prices topped a record $3 a gallon, outraging many Americans and prompting general unease about the...