George W. Bush came to Washington promising to be the un-Clinton. He wouldn't get in people's faces, he wouldn't sully the Oval Office with tawdriness, he wouldn't feel our pain. He has succeeded.

Unfortunately for Bush, at least as of right now, there were two positive things Clinton had going for him that Bush does not: Americans believed that Clinton cared about them, and they thought he was up to the job. This was achieved not merely by policy efforts, but by a 24/7 running campaign that had the president speaking about every possible issue, driving the debate. And it manifested itself as support in the public opinion polls.

President Bush, conversely, has kept himself distant and remote, not merely from the cameras but from the legislative process. The strategy in many ways has been to create a relatively news-free environment. Bush has held fewer press conferences than either Clinton or his father at this point in their presidencies. White House reporters now regularly leave Pennsylvania Avenue to search for stories. Press charters have been canceled for presidential trips due to lack of interest among the press corps.

"His first instinct was to be the opposite of Clinton, which was probably wise," says William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard. "There was a giant sigh of relief that he wasn't in your face, that he didn't feel the need to step into every national issue. But that may now be wearing thin, at least in terms of driving the agenda."

"The A-4 president is getting A-4 attention from the public," says John Czwartacki, former spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., now a lobbyist. "He's not really considered a factor in people's lives right now." ("A-4" refers to Page A-4 in newspapers, where news about Bush has been showing up.)

Unfortunately for Bush, this has begun to show up in the polls. In Washington, the telltale sign that a politician's in trouble comes when the party boss arranges a conference call to argue that there's no trouble at all. On Thursday, Republican National Committee chairman Jim Gilmore did just that, which ended up feeding the fire.

A New York Times/CBS News poll released June 21 showed the president's popular support had dropped 7 points, to a 53 percent approval rating. While Bush's predecessor suffered similar numbers at this point in his first term, Clinton had suffered a few ignominious defeats at this point -- on gays in the military and a host of Nanny-gate scandals. Bush, conversely, has gotten almost all of his $1.35 trillion tax cut passed, in record time, and had just returned from a fairly successful trip to Europe. But Americans seemed to be losing faith in their president regardless.

Moreover, poll respondents had concerns about Bush on specific issues. Support for his handling of environmental issues had dropped to 39 percent of the public; his response to the energy crisis met with only 33 percent approval; and his foreign policy was supported by 47 percent of the public. Fifty percent of those polled thought Bush favored the rich.

Conservatives began immediately lashing out at the poll. "It's a slow news day when the top story in the New York Times is a presidential poll," wrote John J. Miller and Ramesh Ponnuru on Nationalreview.com, "especially a trumped-up one saying George W. Bush's popularity has 'diminished considerably' when in fact it's down only 7 points ... This is perhaps a cause for modest concern at the White House, but no more - surely nothing that warrants the screaming, APB-treatment of the Times." The New York Times' William Safire took a swipe at his paper in its own pages, claiming other polls showed no such drops.

But then came the other polls, which backed up the Times/CBS research. A Pew Research Center poll showed a 6-point dip in the president's approval ratings from April to June, down to 50 percent. A CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll had an 8-point dip in the last three months, to 55 percent. And an NBC-Wall Street Journal poll over the same time period showed a 7-point dip to approval ratings of 50 percent.

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