Like it or not, most of the opinion polls outside the United States have shown that President George W Bush has been unpopular for all sorts of reasons, chief among them, are the decision to wage a war without United Nations' sanction against the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq and also the general perception that, under Bush's first term, the superpower has been increasingly unilateral in its conduct of international relations.

However, it is also a fact that Bush is now the most popular and legitimate president elected in recent years in the most open, democratic and politically competitive country in the world, whose playing field cannot be said to be uneven.

How to account for the obvious discrepancy of Bush's domestic standing and global image?