Gore is toast; liberalism isn't. That's the message of the New York Times/CBS poll published in the Times today. Gore's numbers are abysmal (regular readers of The Daily Howler know why), but even Andrew Sullivan can't whinge as he usually does that the Times has mischaracterized poll respondents' opinions, which seem pretty damn unambiguous to me:

Mr. Bush remains extremely popular. Still, on a number of issues, there was evidence of public ambivalence or, in some cases, opposition to policies that the White House has signaled it will pursue once Republicans assume control in January.

...55 percent of respondents said they disapproved of the White House effort to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, compared with 39 percent who approved. Nearly two-thirds said the federal government should do more to regulate the environmental and safety practices of business.

By a ratio of two to one, Americans said they thought that protecting the environment was more important than producing energy. By a seven-to-one ratio, respondents said that Mr. Bush believed that producing energy was more important than protecting the environment....

...Two-thirds said they would have preferred the federal surplus be used to shore up Social Security and Medicare rather than finance a tax cut. With the surplus gone, 48 percent of those polled said they did not believe it was possible to both cut taxes and reduce the federal budget deficit....

Nearly 60 percent said they believed that Mr. Bush's tax cut benefited the wealthy; just over 25 percent said it benefited the middle class. Four percent said the tax cut primarily benefited the poor. Three-quarters of respondents said that the first round of tax cuts had not made a noticeable difference in their paychecks.