Via Eschaton, an interesting graph juxtaposing Bush’s poll numbers with heightened terror alerts.

UPDATE: On further reflection, I’m not sure this proves that DHS is being used for political purposes. I mean, I’m sure that DHS is being used for political purposes, I’m just not sure this graph proves it.

The Orange Alerts haven’t always necesarrily been issued at the bottom of a Bush slump — there are a couple of points where one has been issued as he was climbing the polls. The spikes after the alerts are issued are natural — we always rally around the president (and the government) when we feel threatened. The post-alert spikes don’t really implicate DHS in political shenanigans. They’d have happened no matter when the alerts were issued. That two of the six were issued while Bush was actually headed upward in the polls I think is pretty good evidence that in this case at least, DHS was probably acting more on evidence of threat than politics.

That’s not saying that the Terror Alert system is a good idea, of course. Nor is it saying that DHS or the war on terror haven’t been exploited by both sides to score raw poltiical points. I just don’t see a strong connection in this case.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 11th, 2005 at 12:08 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.