For his sake, President Bush better be telling the truth when he says he pays no attention to the polls. It would not be much for fun for him if he did pay attention. It seems that every national survey coming out these days reports the president’s most recent approval rating with the same boilerplate announcement: It’s “the lowest of his presidency.” The Wall Street Journal’s Nov. 10 story on its just-released survey with NBC News struggled to be charitable, noting that Bush’s 38 percent approval rating — while the “lowest of his five-year presidency” — was still higher than the low points for his father, Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter.

So there you have it, Mr. President, things aren’t so dire. You’re not as bad off as the recent presidents who either failed to get re-elected or were forced by scandal to resign in a second term.

While Bush has dipped in the polls before, there are at least two new trends in this recent wave that should trouble him. He is losing the personal popularity that once held him steady in tough times. And, for the first time, sizable numbers of Republicans are losing faith in him.

No matter how unsure most Americans were about Bush’s policies, they always liked him enough as a person to give him the benefit of the doubt. Gallup now finds an even split among Americans on whether he has the “personality and leadership qualities” that a president should have. Throughout his presidency and during his campaign for re-election last year, that question provoked responses hovering around 60 percent saying he had the right stuff — even when his policies were at their most unpopular.

Bush’s reputation for straight talk, once his anchor in rough seas, now seems to be fully at risk. In the new Journal/NBC poll, just 33 percent gave him high marks for being “honest and straightforward,” down from 50 percent in January. And a stunning 57 percent said they believed has had “deliberately misled” the nation about the case for war in Iraq.

This unprecedented decline in Bush’s personal popularity began around the time of Hurricane Katrina. It wasn’t just the New Orleans levees that broke. The dam burst behind Bush’s popularity amid the furor over his handling of the disaster. It’s as though all the festering doubts about him came to a head in that episode.

The other shift comes from voters in his own party. A survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, released Nov. 8, found a significant loss of support within the GOP. Overall, the proportion of Republicans who approved of him dropped from 89 percent just after the 2004 election to 77 percent last week. The decline appears to be driven by the party’s moderates and liberals, who make up more than a third of the Republican base and delivered approval ratings that fell from 81 percent in July to 60 percent at the end of September.

Only conservative Republicans, who make up two-thirds of the party’s voters, are staying with the president, although even their support for him has dropped by a full 10 percentage points since January, according to Pew.

You have to go back to Lyndon B. Johnson to find a wartime president this unpopular. One sure sign of trouble is how Bush, like Johnson, prefers military settings for his public appearances. It’s the only venue where audience members can be court-martialed if they show less than enthusiastic support.

Lucky for Bush, he has people to read the polls for him. Or maybe it’s not so lucky. Lately they seem to be learning the wrong lessons from what they are seeing in polls. Sensing that the Republican might have a shot at winning a tightening Virginia governor’s race last week, they sent Bush to the state on a last-minute campaign swing in hopes of taking credit for a dramatic GOP victory. But the once-golden poll readers at the White House missed the mark. Democrat Tim Kaine won handily, and Bush got the blame. If he had stayed out of the state in those last days, he could have avoided the consensus view that the race ended up as a referendum on him.

White House insiders say it is tough for the Bush team to grapple with his problems because he is not particularly receptive to things he doesn’t want to hear. And there is no Walter Cronkite around to pull the plug, as happened to LBJ.

“If I’ve lost Walter Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America,” Johnson reportedly told aides in 1968 after the CBS News anchor announced on his broadcast he did not think the United States was winning the Vietnam War. A month later Johnson ended the bombing in North Vietnam and announced that he would not run for another term.

Bush has lost Middle America, unless the half-dozen national polls now circulating have all gotten it wrong. But who will tell him, and what can be done about it?

Maybe he needs to start reading the polls for himself.

Contributing Editor Craig Crawford is a news analyst for MSNBC, CNBC and “The Early Show” on CBS. He can be reached at ccrawford@cq.com.