Poll: Clinton's Approval Ratings Improve
June 22, 2004 -- -- Time, the great healer, is working its wonders for Bill Clinton, as it has for many an ex-president before him.
At the start of Clinton's memoir book tour, his retrospective job approval rating, 62 percent, tops its average during his presidency. And personal assessments of Clinton, while still hardly robust, have improved significantly since he called Washington home, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll.
Americans now split evenly on Clinton "as a person." Half say they've got a favorable impression of him, 49 percent unfavorable. Opinions of him were much more unfavorable — as high as 67 percent negative — during the Monica Lewinsky scandal and its aftermath.
It was assessments of Clinton's job performance — his professional rating, rather than his personal one — that sustained him during the scandal and his impeachment trial. Across his presidency, an average of 57 percent of Americans approved of his work in office, a mid-tier rating for postwar presidents that matches Ronald Reagan's.
Clinton's current 62 percent approval, 37 percent disapproval retrospective job rating is similar to his valedictory rating (65 percent approval, 32 percent disapproval at the end of his presidency) — one that tends to serve more as a farewell than as a true job evaluation. During his career, Clinton's approval hit bottom during the long hangover from the 1990-91 recession (43 percent in June 1993) and topped out shortly after the Lewinsky scandal broke (69 percent in January 1998).
It's a common phenomenon for Americans to look back on past presidents with less critical eyes. Four years after George H.W. Bush left office, his retrospective approval rating was 63 percent, up considerably from the end of his term. Jimmy Carter, who had the lowest average job approval of all postwar presidents, did 20 points better in a 1999 poll, 18 years after he left office. And Reagan received a retrospective approval rating of 73 percent in 2002.
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