Bush on the ropes.

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It now seems likely that George W. Bush will be a one-term President. Much of the country has lost confidence in his leadership. Barring another terrorist attack or the apprehension of Osama bin Laden or extreme electoral shenanigans, Bush will probably go down to defeat in November.

The polls have been trending against Bush for some time now. A Zogby poll, conducted in mid-May, showed Bush's job approval rating down to a record low of 42 percent, a drop of six points from April. Right after toppling Saddam Hussein, Bush was at 75 percent in most polls.

How things change.

In a head-to-head race with John Kerry, Bush lost in the Zogby poll 47 to 42. (Interestingly, with Ralph Nader in the race, the spread was the same, with Nader picking up 3 percent, though almost every other poll shows Nader taking votes from Kerry.)

When asked whether Bush deserved to be reelected, only 41.8 percent told Zogby yes, while 53 percent said it was time for someone new. Equally worrisome for Bush is that 54 percent of those polled thought the United States was headed in the wrong direction, and only 40 percent thought it was headed in the right direction. When voters don't like the direction the country is going in, they are not likely to want to "stay the course," as Bush urges them to do.

The polls are clear about what is dragging Bush down: the Iraq War. Zogby reported 64 percent disapproving of Bush's handling of the war and only 36 percent approving. (CBS had his Iraq approval rating at only 30 percent, and other pollsters had it at around 41 percent but showed his Iraq numbers plummeting in May.)

It's easy to understand why America is turning sour on the war. As of June 2, according to the Pentagon, 811 U.S. soldiers had been killed in Iraq and 4,982 wounded. Phantom weapons of mass destruction and all the hype around them haunt Bush's reputation. And the price tag for the war--more than $100 billion a year has made many Americans balk.

The torture scandal dogs him, too. A Washington Post/ABC poll of May 25 found that 57 percent of Americans disapproved of the President's handling of this scandal, while only 36 percent approved. Maybe it wasn't clever of Bush to say the nation owes Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld "a debt of gratitude."

And despite Bush's synthetic handover of power, there appears to be no end in sight for U.S. troops in Iraq. He vows to keep 138,000 troops there, and he says he'll send more if the generals request it. This increasingly...