public opinion

A New York Times/CBS News poll finds that eighty-one percent of Americans think the country is now on the "wrong track."

That Americans are pessimistic isn't terribly surprising: The last year of the Bush Era feels like a cross between the final days of the Truman and the Carter Administrations, with a widely-disliked president presiding over an unpopular foreign war and a struggling economy -- a rare and understandably dispiriting combination. Still, the depths of the public's discouragement about America's prospects is striking, and one statistic in particular from the Times poll should be pasted on every political journalist's bulletin board: "Seventy-eight percent of respondents said the country was worse off than five years ago; just 4 percent said it was better off."