In a new Gallup poll, President Bush's approval rating has plunged to 52%.

As you can see if you check the summaries of Gallup's poll and other polls at Polling Report (here and here), Gallup's numbers have always skewed somewhat high -- since 9/11/01, Bush hasn't previously been below 57% in the Gallup survey (in virtually every other poll he dipped to the mid- to low 50s between January and March of this year). So this is bad news for the White House.

There's a lot to chew on at the Gallup link. One thing of note:

Slightly more than half of Americans -- 52% -- say that things are going badly for the United States in Iraq now that the major fighting has ended.

That's a muted way of describing the Gallup result on Iraq. This is the first time a majority of Americans have said things are going badly in the poll. That's important.