New York, NY —

ANCHOR: Some new polls in our area have good news for Democrats - and Republicans - as long as they don't actually govern here. WNYC's Brian Lehrer explains.


Brian Lehrer: It's odd, but it works like this. We love all our federal politicians right now, and we hate all our local ones. In this week's Quinnipiac Poll, President Bush, Senator Schumer and Senator Clinton all get high approval ratings: 58 percent for Bush, 59 percent for Schumer, 52 for Clinton.

But Governor Pataki gets his lowest approval rating ever: 43 percent. And in a NY1 poll, Mayor Bloomberg takes a record dive with a 59 percent DIS-approval rating. New Jersey's no exception. A Fairleigh Dickinson poll out Thursday found two thirds think Governor McGreevey's job performance is fair or poor.

This presents the Connoisseur of Conventional Wisdom with at least two challenges to his world view. One: Lots of people like both George W. Bush and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Could this actually be true? I asked for callers who fit the description, and sure enough


Caller: I love Hil, but also Wolfowitz, and Bush is his guy
Me: Who would you vote for for Pres between Mr. Bush and Mrs. Clinton?
Caller: I don't know.


Apparently, a lot of people don't know. For now at least, in the afterglow of the war in Iraq, Bush would roll over any of the declared Democratic Presidential candidates in New York: against Lieberman, Kerry or Gephardt, Bush would win about 50-38 percent. There is only one Democrat who would fight him to a statistical tie today: you guessed it: Hillary Rodham Clinton. Which if you think about it, is quite amazing for both of them. Bush didn't even campaign in New York last time, he considered it such a lost cause. And according to to talk radio, Hillary Clinton is the Devil. But most New Yorkers don't take their marching orders from the Democratic party, or from Rush Limbaugh, and seem to have concluded both Clinton and Bush are doing their jobs.

The leaves a puzzle for the mayor and the governors: why does all political resentment seem to be local? I asked Quinnipiac Poll Director Maurice Carroll.


Carroll: One word: budgets
Me: But doesn't some of this trickle down from Washington?
Carroll: Not the most important part: schools

And therein lies the other challenge to conventional wisdom - to the conventional wisdom that says tax hikes are always politically unacceptable. The Quinnipiac poll reveals that 70 percent of New Yorkers statewide, including 60 percent of Republicans, favor a temporary surtax on the wealthy to get us through the fiscal crisis - a move that Governor Pataki is ruling out - while 88 percent, the single largest number in any of these polls, said no cuts to public schools to balance the state budget. Guess what the Governor is proposing.