Terry Schiavo is Bad for President Bush

From the beginning I think we have almost all felt that this sad story was intensely personal and, right or wrong, feeding tube or no feeding tube, should not be trotted out in the media day in and day out. It seems to have the effect of making this poor personal family crisis into a freak show.

Why, then, do we hear so much about it? Because, I had thought, it was what evangelical Christians wanted us to hear about, and they hold sway over our government in many ways. Well, that's partly true, but now there is a new CBS poll that shows even the vast majority of evangelicals do not like the government's getting involved in the Terry Schiavo case.

This is heart-warming in two ways. First, it means we are all more alike than we realized (a huge majority of every group polled, from liberals to evangelicals, wants the government to butt out). Second, it means that the Bush administration's unprincipled obedience to a few errant nutjobs from the extremities of the religious community is finally catching up to them politically: The same poll finds Bush's approval rating down six points, to 43 percent, since a month ago.