According to the latest MSNBC/Newsweek poll, George W. Bush has the worst approval rating of any President since Jimmy Carter, and he’s holding the entire GOP Presidential field back:

May 5, 2007 – Itâ€™s hard to say which is worse news for Republicans: that George W. Bush now has the worst approval rating of an American president in a generation, or that he seems to be dragging every â€™08 Republican presidential candidate down with him. But According to the new NEWSWEEK Poll, the publicâ€™s approval of Bush has sunk to 28 percent, an all-time low for this president in our poll, and a point lower than Gallup recorded for his father at Bush Sr.â€™s nadir. The last president to be this unpopular was Jimmy Carter who also scored a 28 percent approval in 1979. This remarkably low rating seems to be casting a dark shadow over the GOPâ€™s chances for victory in â€™08. The NEWSWEEK Poll finds each of the leading Democratic contenders beating the Republican frontrunners in head-to-head matchups.

Just as Carter’s downfall was the Iranian Hostage Crisis, it seems that the Iraq War, which remains increasingly unpopular among all segments of the public, is Bush’s downfall and he’s dragging the Republican Party down with him. Even William F. Buckley, Jr, the conservatives conservative, had this to say about the Administration’s Iraq policy and it’s impact on the party:

[B]eyond affirming executive supremacy in matters of war, what is George Bush going to do? It is simply untrue that we are making decisive progress in Iraq. The indicators rise and fall from day to day, week to week, month to month. In South Vietnam there was an organized enemy. There is clearly organization in the strikes by the terrorists against our forces and against the civil government in Iraq, but whereas in Vietnam we had Hanoi as the operative headquarters of the enemy, we have no equivalent of that in Iraq, and that is a matter of paralyzing importance. All those bombings, explosions, assassinations: we are driven to believe that they are, so to speak, spontaneous. (…) General Petraeus is a wonderfully commanding figure. But if the enemy is in the nature of a disease, he cannot win against it. Students of politics ask then the derivative question: How can the Republican party, headed by a president determined on a war he canâ€™t see an end to, attract the support of a majority of the voters? General Petraeus, in his Pentagon briefing on April 26, reported persuasively that there has been progress, but cautioned, â€œI want to be very clear that there is vastly more work to be done across the board and in many areas, and again I note that we are really just getting started with the new effort.â€ The general makes it a point to steer away from the political implications of the struggle, but this cannot be done in the wider arena. There are grounds for wondering whether the Republican party will survive this dilemma.

Some will say that Buckley is being overly dramatic, and he probably is. The Iraq War may not bring about the end of the Republican Party as an organized entity, but it could very well force it into the same kind of permanent minority status that it saw in the aftermath of the Great Depression. From 1932 until 1952, not a single Republican was elected President and, even then, it wasn’t a GOP politician who won but a war hero.

Politically, though, the lesson is clear. Republican candidates will suffer at the poll to the extent they are associated with the policies of George W. Bush. Eventually, some enterprising, charismatic Republican somewhere is going to see an opportunity in that fact.