ion, as well as to the fact that Reagan had pretty much shoved through Congress all his desired bills in the first term.
The Bush election suggested a more equitable relationship, despite the landslide nature of Bush's victory, simply because Reagan had made all the conservative economic and social changes Bush might have made, and because Bush simply did not have the personal power to push Congress around, with the support of the people, that Reagan had had.
On the other hand, the beginning of Bush's term saw the problems of House Speaker Jim Wright making the headlines. Wright was seen by the people as representative of the self-serving and corrupt nature of Congress, and, as Ladd writes, "In the spring of 1989, when the tribulations of House Speaker Jim Wright got headlines, the share of those who disapproved of Congress's performance grew . . . or mid-1970s on to the present. Throughout this span, disapproval has generally been high . . . between 1975 and March 1990 . . . the approval share averaged just 36 percent" (Ladd 18).
From the viewpoint of the people, then, for whatever it is worth in translating it into actual power, the rating of Congress is invariably lower than that of the President. It was true under Reagan and it has been true under Bush as well. In 1990, Ladd writes, "the gap between approval of President Bush and approval of Congress was over thirty percentage points. For the last fifteen years the gap has averaged about twenty points."
Hitchens writes of the relative weakness and indirection of Congress under Bush, focusing first on the attempt by the Democrats to blame the nation's problems on Bush.
Hitchens writes: "On January 7 . . . the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee held a day of hearings on the recession and the unemployment it has brought about. The committee is dominated by the democrats, and the idea was to use C-Span . . . to pin the
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