While George W. Bush isn't known for executing "plans" very well, his image rehabilitation master plan, against all odds, seems to be working out just fine. A new poll shows that his popularity has straight-up exploded in the last few months, and though it's impossible to know exactly why the ex-president who earned the highest disapproval rating at the end of his tenure since Richard Nixon suddenly looks a bit more palatable, it's safe to hazard a guess.

According to CNN:

Six in 10 Americans, 61%, say they now have a favorable view of the 43rd President of the United States in the latest CNN poll conducted by SSRS, nearly double the 33% who gave him a favorable mark when he left the White House in January 2009.

Granted, Americans have super short political memories, which is why we are apparently hoping that trickle-down economics will work this third time around, but the really surprising jump here is among Democrats specifically: Bush went from an 11 percent approval rating when he left office in 2009 to a whopping 54 percent today. His numbers among Republicans haven't changed much.

There's more at work here other than Bush not being a president who stamped his name on every gold-colored surface within arm's reach, of course. It helps that after nearly a decade of a White House sans Bushes, the man can't really do any more damage. This means that he's remained relatively free from news coverage detailing his habits of, say, starting endless wars, or mismanaging disaster relief. And since he's even appeared in photos being hugged by Michelle Obama, who can be bothered to remember, really, what all the fuss was about way back when the economy cratered, and we'd been in Afghanistan for what was then less than a decade, and all that spying on U.S. citizens was just getting started?

Of course, it's impossible to remove Trump from the calculus, especially since he is becoming more of an offensive mess each week. Science has irrefutably proven that anyone looks good when they're standing next to Donald Trump. Hell, that's basically Mike Pence's whole strategy to become president.