On Fox News Sunday, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol selectively cited polls by the Associated Press and by Rasmussen Reports to claim that President Bush's current job approval ratings are “almost the same” as what the AP reported to be his approval ratings over his handling of relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina. Reacting to host Chris Wallace's display of a September 16-18 AP/Ipsos poll that showed Bush's approval rating on Katrina at 46 percent with 51 percent disapproving, Kristol said that those numbers were “almost the same as his general approval-disapproval.” National Public Radio (NPR) national correspondent Mara Liasson agreed that Bush's Katrina and overall ratings were “almost the same,” as did Wallace. Then, in order to bolster his claim further, Kristol cited a Rasmussen Reports tracking poll that placed Bush's overall approval rating at 45 percent, with 54 percent disapproving. Rasmussen reported those numbers on September 23, 24, and 25.

By citing only the Rasmussen poll for Bush's overall approval rating, Kristol masked the AP poll's significantly lower findings on that question. Bush's overall approval, as measured on the same September 16-18 AP/Ipsos poll that Wallace used as his source for Bush's Katrina numbers, was at 40 percent, with 57 percent disapproving. A September 16-18 Gallup poll found the same overall approval rating of 40 percent, with 58 percent disapproving.

Fox News Washington managing editor Brit Hume then used Kristol's elevated approval number to attack a comment by NPR special correspondent Juan Williams, who characterized recent polling as showing that only Bush's “hard-core” support remained. Hume derided Williams' claim that only Bush's hard-core support remained as “silly,” saying that since Bush's “hard-core” support was at 46 percent -- the higher approval rating that Kristol used -- that would be “the largest political base that anybody's ever had in the history of the country, if not the world.”

Kristol also cherry-picked Rasmussen's polling data to avoid tarnishing his rosy characterization of Bush's political standing. While Kristol cited the Rasmussen tracking poll (which gave Bush a higher overall approval rating than the AP), he did not note Rasmussen's September 18 poll (which put Bush's Katrina approval rating far lower than the AP poll). According to Rasmussen, only 35 percent of Americans rated Bush's Katrina response excellent or good, while 64 percent called Bush's Katrina response fair or poor.

In addition, while both AP and Rasmussen's poll numbers do agree with Kristol that Bush's approval rating has not dropped significantly since Katrina, others, such as pollster Mark Blumenthal, have commented that “if Katrina did not alter Americans' overall rating of Bush,” the hurricane response “certainly did collapse perceptions of Bush on one key dimension: Being a 'strong and decisive leader,'” which, according to Gallup, has dropped nine points after Katrina.

From the September 25 broadcast of Fox Broadcasting Co.'s Fox News Sunday:

WALLACE: Let's talk about President Bush, who has been trying ever since the first days of Katrina to regain public confidence in his leadership. And let's take a look at a poll, an Associated Press poll, conducted after the president's prime-time speech to the nation from New Orleans. As you can see, 46 percent approved of the way he was handling Katrina relief, 51 percent still disapproved. Bill, how has the president, do you believe, done so far in his handling of Rita?

KRISTOL: I think he's done fine. Those poll numbers are not bad. That's about his general approval-disapproval --

WALLACE: No, that was in specific --

KRISTOL: No, no, but I'm saying --

LIASSON: They're almost the same.

KRISTOL: -- they're almost the same as his general approval-disapproval.

WALLACE: Yes. Yes.

KRISTOL: So basically Bush has approval in the low to mid-40s. He took a little hit this month. If you look at Scott Rasmussen's tracking poll, which goes every day, Bush was at 47-52 on September 1st, and he's at 45-54 today. So “no big deal” is my ultimate judgment on the meaning of these hurricanes for the Bush presidency.

WALLACE: Do you agree with that, Juan, that it really hasn't done any lasting damage to the president, Hurricane Katrina and his response?

WILLIAMS: No, I think it has done damage, and especially as to -- I think it's done damage to what is the stem and stern of the Bush presidency, which is his leadership and leadership in the face of 9-11. I think that whole notion of his leadership has been undercut in this regard. And you know, what's keeping him afloat right now -- what's driven the numbers down is he's lost moderate GOP support. And it's just about -- you know, it's a small percent and he's lost about half of that. But, then, the hard-core, right-wing support that's, you know, in this very partisan political atmosphere has stayed true to the president, that's what's keeping him afloat. But gosh, as you travel around, the amount of criticism you hear of the president, the disappointment -- I think it's more disappointment than criticism. It's pretty strong.

LIASSON: You know, the question --

HUME: It's amazing if we get 46 percent of Americans who are hard-core right-wing supporters of the president, that's probably the largest political base that anybody's ever had in the history of the country, if not the world. So obviously, that's silly. I mean, Bill's right; he lost a couple of percentage points. Ask yourself this question: Who was president during the Johnstown flood? Who was president during the San Francisco earthquake? Who was president during the great Galveston flood that killed 6,000 people? You ask people that question, nobody knows because nobody remembers. They don't associate presidents with natural disasters, except briefly at the time.