Quick Note: I have a rule on this blog about not taking political positions if I can avoid it. So while the topic of this post is a political figure I’ve tried not to take a side on the actual politics.
I don’t even think Conservatives saw this coming…
Americans are now pretty evenly divided about whether they would rather have Barack Obama or George W. Bush in the White House. 48% prefer Obama while 46% say they would rather have the old President back.
Bush had atrocious approval ratings for his final few years in office, particularly because he lost a lot of support from Republicans and conservative leaning independents. Those folks may not have liked him but they now say they would rather have him back than Obama. 87% of GOP voters now say they would prefer Bush, a number a good deal higher than Bush's approval rating within his party toward the tail end of his Presidency. Democrats predictably go for Obama by an 86/10 margin, and independents lean toward him as well by a 49/37 spread.
Important to note is that this is not from a right-wing source. It’s from Public Policy Polling which is a research firm that caters almost exclusively to Democrats. To quote Wikipedia…
The neutrality of PPP's surveys has been questioned since the firm's clients are exclusively Democratic-affiliated organizations…
At this point you might be wondering “Why is this on a tech blog?”
There’s this mentality in the online world that you need to jump out and defend yourself against all enemies. That you need to have a blog, twitter account, etc. and use them to constantly bombard people with your side of the story.
But in truth that isn’t always the right strategy.
I wasn’t a fan of the Bush presidency but objectively it wasn’t as bad as people made it out to be (for example they may have been wrong to go into Iraq but I’ve never been able to find proof of anyone lying and I’ve looked). Former President Bush would have been justified in defending himself against certain claims that have been made since he left office. But he didn’t. Even as his predecessor was attacking him.
In fact he steadfastly refused to comment or criticize his predecessor and was rewarded for it.
The public tends to get agitated by those who constantly defend themselves. There’s nothing wrong with stating your case once but if you keep pushing your defense into people’s faces they’ll usually reject it. In fact they’ll often suspect you more because of your obsessive need to defend yourself.
Just because you can scream from every mountain top doesn’t mean you should. Sometimes you should just keep quiet and trust in people to treat you fairly in the end.