Approval Ratings

I have a pretty big problem when it comes to approval ratings for how the President is doing. I believe that it sways other people into thinking that the President is doing a good job when he or she may not be. A great example that I can think of comes out of the Bush administration. After September 11th, Bush's approval ratings shot up. After two weeks, it was raised even more. I believe this is because people hear these ratings polls and just go along with it without looking into it. I also believe that many news stations do this exact same thing, and that they should be more critical even in times of crisis. When a president has these higher approval ratings, he or she can gain more power using this as a tool.

As I stated, the Bush administrations approval rating was once at a really high level. This did not help the country because he gained much more power than he should have. He pretty much had control over congress, and the American people were willing to go along with whatever he wanted because since his approval rating was so high, he must be doing the right thing. We can look back not and see that no he wasn't doing the right thing, but congress and the American people went along with it blindly for a good period of time. I think we should do away with approval ratings for this exact reason, it doesn't benefit anyone and it skews the perception of the American people and leads to what happened in the Bush administration.