US President George W. Bush's overall approval rating has slipped to 68 percent from 70 percent amid ballooning corporate scandals that have sent the US stock market into a tailspin, according to an opinion poll made public Saturday.
The survey by Newsweek magazine also found that a 51-percent majority also approved of the way the president has responded to recent business scandals while thirty-two percent disapproved.
Fifty-one percent of those surveyed also expressed the view that President Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney's former business background made them better able to deal with corporate scandals and help them develop policies to reduce corporate wrongdoing.
Thirty-eight percent said it made them less likely to support the kinds of policies needed to deal with the scandals and reduce corporate wrongdoing.
But public opinion is split on whether the president's corporate reform proposals are tough enough on wrongdoing of corporate executives.
Forty-seven percent said they are not tough enough, while 34 percent believed they are about right, according to the survey. Only three percent of Americans think they are tougher than necessary.
Meanwhile, 48 percent thought that corporate reform legislation passed this past week by the US Senate, which provides for new criminal penalties for executives who defraud investors, will only have a minor effect on reducing future corporate wrongdoing, the poll showed.
Fourteen percent thought it will have no effect, and only 26 percent thought it will have a major effect.
In a separate survey by Time magazine and CNN television, 72 percent of those polled said the corporate scandals were not isolated incidents and may indicate a pattern of deception of the part of large companies.
The Time/CNN toll also showed that Americans by a ratio of 44 percent to 33 percent trusted congressional Democrats more than Republicans to handle the accounting scandals.
The Newsweek poll of 1,000 adults was conducted Thursday and Friday and had a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points. The Time/CNN poll of 1,003 adult was conducted Wednesday and Thursday and had a margin of error of 3.1 percent.
(China Daily July 15, 2002)
