Different Bushes ending up in same hole

WASHINGTON — Through his presidency, George W. Bush has worked hard to avoid repeating the mistakes of his father. He has done almost everything differently, yet now finds himself in the same hole despite trumping his dad by winning a second term.

He is roughly at the same place in the polls where the elder Bush was at the low point of his presidency, with only about three of every 10 Americans registering approval. Like his father before him, this president faces a rebellion among conservatives, an uncertain economic outlook and the prospect of Republican losses in November.

The first President Bush liked to quote Yogi Berra, his favorite pop philosopher, and his curious take on a baseball loss: "We made too many wrong mistakes."

What were the biggest mistakes of George W. Bush's presidency? When asked that at an April 2004 news conference, he said he could not think of any. A far more subdued Bush now acknowledges some major ones — and not the ones his father made.

They include "kind of tough talk, you know, that sent the wrong signal to people," Bush said at a Thursday news conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair. He said the inhumane treatment of Iraqi prisoners at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison was one of the darkest marks on his watch.

"Now I think he wishes he had not taken a blanket view that everything his father did was wrong," said Bruce Buchanan, a University of Texas professor who has closely studied the Bush family. "Staying out of Baghdad looks like a brilliant move at this point." During the Persian Gulf War in 1991, the first President Bush did not send U.S. troops into Baghdad to oust President Saddam Hussein after the U.S.-led coalition ousted the Iraqi army from Kuwait.

The current president says the 2003 invasion that drove Saddam from power was right.

A recent AP-Ipsos poll put Bush's approval rating at 33 percent Other polls have put him even lower. Bush the elder sunk to 29 percent in a Gallup Poll in early August 1992 soon after Democrats nominated Bill Clinton.

The differences are most pronounced on Iraq. They also extend to the Bushes' attitudes on international institutions, government spending and taxes and fealty to conservatives.

"If you didn't know them, if you came from Mars and became a student of both presidencies, you wouldn't know they were father and son," said Republican strategist Ed Rogers, an official in the first Bush White House.