There's a new New York Times/CBS poll out, and that floor holding up Bush's approval rating at approximately 40% is apparently made of concrete:

The hurricane, alone, does not appear to have taken any significant toll on Mr. Bush's overall job approval rating, which remains stuck virtually where it has been since early summer....

Mr. Bush's support remained strong among Republicans, conservatives, evangelical Christians and those who said they voted for him last fall....

Over all, 41 percent of respondents approved of Mr. Bush's performance in office, while 53 percent disapproved. Those figures are in line with other national polls conducted in the last week, roughly equal to the worst ratings Mr. Bush has ever received, comparable to Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton's worst ratings, but well above the worst ever posted by the president's father, Jimmy Carter and Richard M. Nixon.....



We keep waiting for Bush to do something that will make the scales fall from these people's eyes. It's not going to happen. Ever. We have to accept the fact that this is as unpopular as he's ever going to get.

Forget politics -- the model for what's going on is ethnic. What you have to understand is that the people in Bush's base believe they are as embattled, as hated, as discriminated against as non-whites have been in this country, or as various white ethnic groups have been.

Think of how African-Americans in the middle part of the twentieth century embraced black heroes of popular culture -- Joe Louis, say, or Jackie Robinson. Italian-Americans of my parents' and grandparents' generation similarly embraced Sinatra, DiMaggio, Caruso. Bush's base feels about him exactly the way those groups felt about those heroes: He is one of them, and against great odds he has risen to glory. You could reveal whatever there is to reveal about Sinatra; pizzeria owners in Brooklyn and East Boston and elsewhere will never take his picture off the walls. That's how Bush's base feels about him -- he could never do anything that would make them reject him, and if something he does causes others in America to reject him, they'll rationalize it or shrug it off, or turn their anger on his critics.

Of course, ethnic prejudice in America has been a real thing; by contrast, it's not clear what drives the sense of grievance in Bush's base. Actually, it is clear: If you say that people who don't believe in the majority religion have the right not to be coerced to pray that religion's prayers by the state, the religious Bushists think they're being discriminated against. If you say that gay people should have all the rights straight people have, the social conservative Bushists insist their rights are being taken away. If you say that the Iraq War has made America less safe, the bellicose Bushists say that you're making them less safe.

So the Bushists -- embattled everywhere they turn -- feel like blacks in the Jim Crow south, or Irish-American Five Points slum-dwellers faced with Abraham Lincoln's military draft. They're the most hated group in America -- never mind the fact that they form the country's most powerful voting bloc, or that their allies control every part of the federal government. They're under siege. Every day the rest of us grind them into the dust -- but one man stands up for them, and stands tall. Rejecting Bush would be like rejecting themselves.