what was the casuse of the slide in Nahda's popularity

"Some attribute the slide in Nahda’s popularity to a Salafist mob’s attack on the American embassy in Tunis last September. “After that,” says Mr Merone, “people said, ‘Enough with these bearded people’.”"  How dumb is this observation?  So it was not the repression, dirty tricks, the injection of religious laws, or the campaign against secularism, but that the attack on the US embassy is what enraged the Tunisian people? How dumb is that really?