bondra -- Responding to your "Bloody hell, can those Americans get any dumber?" I'm amazed that you managed to get through that tendentious gobbledygook from the Guardian. Jonathan Raban has concocted an exotic brew of American exceptionalism, anti-intellectualism, authoritarianism, nativism, and charismatic evangelicalism. Did he leave out millenialism? I got lost. And he lays this unholy mess at the feet of our Pilgrim heritage, the victor over our enlightened Virginia tradition in the eternal manichean conflict between "religion and reason." Whew!

I understand the impulse of Europeans (in this case I include Brits) to try to apprehend the value systems and belief structures that could produce a re-election victory for someone they view as demonstrably and odiously unqualified not only to be President of the United States but leader of the world. They don't get a vote, yet their futures are certainly affected by the resident of the White House. The objective of analysis, however, is to "demystify," not produce some incoherent kabbalistic theory to prove the inherent incomprehensibility of the "other". (One could make the same comment about most writing on followers of Islam.)

I must pick a quarrel with you a bit on the "merits" (not of Raban's piece but of why Bush retains a considerable base of support on foreign policy, even from people who have concluded that Iraq is going to hell in a handbasket). First, from polling data on specific beliefs**, it's clear that there indeed remains for at least a third of the population a considerable disconnect between perceptions of the entire Iraq saga, as narrated by the Bush Admin and the BC04 campaign (with constantly shifting details, to put it most charitably), and the accumulating evidence from official reports and credible information from the ground.

Some of this disconnect is due simply to how much attention people pay to day-to-day news. I also agree with the growing body of analysis that the Bush Admin has been singularly adept at taking advantage of the structural weaknesses of mainstream media to avoid challenges to their pattern of saying black is white and down is up. (In the blog world, Jay Rosen's PressThink has been doing an especially thoughtful job of plumbing the dysfunctional depths that the MSM (or what he refers to as "legacy media") has reached. Courtesy Rosen, I've recently discovered Rhetorica, whose author Andrew Cline, a prof of journalism at SW Missouri State, has been providing a running commentary during campaign season.)

A portion of the disconnect can be attributed to how people receive and process bits and pieces of information that aren't congruent with their original beliefs of what is factual. The subject of "cognitive dissonance" is a fascinating one. We should recall that the famous "credibility gap" that emerged about Viet Nam took time to ripen, even though data to demonstrate that gap began to emerge at a fairly early date. I think we're seeing a similar process underway here.

As I argued in "Media tipping point - Bush's credibility gap becomes official," I think Kerry's big opportunity came in mid-September with the leak of the report of the National Intelligence Council about prospects in Iraq. This changed the media dynamics. Prior to the report, the media was limited to contrasting the Bush Admin's "freedom on the march" with a range of other "opinions" -- from experts, former military brass, reporters on the ground -- each of which could be discredited as having an axe to grind or an interest in being "bad news bears." The constant refrain that "we never hear the good news" was difficult to counter, and to the media's discredit, they didn't really try very hard.

The NIC report was "official," with no way for the Bush Admin to dismiss it easily (other than Bush's quickly retracted characterization of the report's conclusions as a "guess"). So the media then had something solid it could compare with the Bush Admin's elaborate machinations to twist undeniable information into their happy-face narrative. The WMD report released last week is a further vehicle for the media to confront the party line with reality. The BC04 campaign couldn't dismiss it, so they've tried to embrace it. And for a considerable portion of their base, they will indeed succeed in fitting this embarrassing information into their explanatory narrative (David Brooks being the most shameless example).

There's an extremely interesting bifurcation happening in the internals of opinion polls for prospective voters who indicate that their biggest concern is foreign policy. For those who place "Iraq" at the top of the list, Kerry has opened a lead, and it's been widening. For those who identify "terrorism" as their primary concern, Bush has continued to hold his ground.****

This is a similar pattern to what we saw in Viet Nam. (Caveat, this is based on personal impressions, looking back thirty-some years, rather than a study of polling data, which I have neither the time nor the interest in researching.) Over time, among those who saw the war as primarily a conflict between North and South Viet Nam, and the US as having promised to assist the South's government, those pesky facts became more and more difficult to discount. Let's call these folks the "utilitarians," who took a rather cost/benefit approach to the US fighting. They were not strongly anti-war per se, nor did they disagree with the basic premise that the containment of and resistance to communism was a cornerstone of US policy.

At some point for the utilitarians, the benefit to the US of an independent South Viet Nam and the potential cost in stature if we withdrew, began to be outweighed by the costs (domestic and international) of the US continuing to prosecute the war against the North. There was a gradual swing in opinion among a portion of this group toward considering withdrawal as an option, even among those who had strongly supported escalation at various points after the Gulf of Tonkin. Some among this group arrived at a different conclusion, believing that we were simply not adopting appropriate combat techniques or that we were too timid in our application of force. Nonetheless they shared a utilitarian perspective.

For those who viewed Viet Nam primarily through the prism of a global battle with communism, however, the facts were less easily embraced (the continuing romanticizing of the South Vietnamese leadership being a case in point). They continued to see the war in Southeast Asia as the frontlines of our national defense; victory was a national imperative. Bad news was "defeatism" either by those who did not have the appropriate degree of courage or perseverance or by the "enemy within." When they began to accept the bad news as perhaps reflecting some degree of reality, many blamed the "defeatists" at home for the bad results, rather than questioning the merits of the entire undertaking. From whence the myth that Viet Nam was lost in the living rooms of America.

In analogizing the pattern of attitudes regarding Viet Nam to current divisions in public opinion, I'd put the Bush supporters who see "terror" as their primary concern in a position similar to the anti-communists who believed Viet Nam was critical to our national defense and was the frontlines of the global fight against communism. It is this group that is more likely to filter information coming from Iraq as either not as bad as the media is making it out to be (giving strong credence to the claims that the "real" Iraqis are "for freedom" and therefore not our enemies) and/or believing that this is ultimately a battle of wills and the most important thing to do is to strengthen our determination.

Returning to Raban's premise that US public opinion represents the victory of "religion over reason," I am hard pressed to find a dimension of religious beliefs or "religiosity" when we segment American attitudes and opinion. There is, however, certainly an undercurrent of a fight to the finish between "good" and "evil" within the "war on terror" group, as it was within the "fight against communism" group during the Viet Nam era. The highly-charged emotional identification with American democracy -- versus "godless Communism" or "heretical Islamists" -- may be founded on traditional religious belief for some, but for others the "good" is equated instead with America's "civic religion" of liberty. It is the "war on terror" group that is more likely to take the position that open criticism of the way the Bush Admin has been prosecuting the war is bad for troop morale or, in adopting the Zell Miller approach, virtually the equivalent of giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

I am not suggesting that the "war on terror" group fails to collect and rationally analyze information. On the contrary, the intellectual leaders of this group often view themselves as the most "tough minded" part of the spectrum of opinion. But we can speculate that the intensity of emotional response to the "enemy" is more intense for this group than for the utilitarians. The same speculation would apply to the emotional aversion to "war" felt by those individuals who are not pacifists as a matter of principle but find it virtually impossible to accept a justification for any armed conflict other than humanitarian emergencies.

A broad brushed use of "religion" to explain American attitudes doesn't provide any guidance as to how opinion is likely to evolve, especially if the coming months in Iraq continue to promise a long, hard slog with few benefits at the end of the road. Even if we go so far as to equate "the city on the hill" with religious sentiment, the notion of American exceptionalism was as often a feature of anti-war critiques during Viet Nam as arguments in favor of continuing to fight. Once withdrawal became a question of when rather than whether, the pulpits of America, Protestant or Catholic, were as likely occupied by opponents as proponents of the Nixon-Kissinger "peace with honor" strategy. That strategy was neither a victory of "reason" or "religion" nor an attempt to split the difference. Rather, by combining eventual withdrawal with steps to strengthen the anti-communist forces, it held together, for long enough to sign a peace agreement, a working plurality of utilitarians (those in favor of prudent gradual withdrawal as well as those who hoped for more aggressive combat strategy, such as bombing Cambodia) with the true-believer anti-communists.

The segmentation of attitudes along the lines we saw during Viet Nam has more predictive value. It suggests that even if the Bush "credibility gap" has not widened sufficiently to defeat him in November, it is likely to quickly handcuff his second term. Robert Novak's disclosure of a plan to get troops home by the end of next year caused a great tizzy amonog the chattering classes and sent Republican surrogates to microphones around the country. But Novak's speculations are perfectly reasonable. In effect he's saying that members of the current Bush Admin expect that public sentiment will shift sufficiently away from continued presence in Iraq that they will be forced to fashion a more rapid exit strategy, Rather than fight a rear-guard action, they are preparing to be out in front of the wave.

The comment by Donald Rumsfeld while visiting troops in Baghdad this weekend, suggesting that troop levels could begin to be reduced if post-January violence starts to decline, is consistent with Novak's report and, from a utilitarian like Rumsfeld, quite sensible. The fact that it is also the approach being proposed by Kerry (with the only apparent difference being a hope for some international assistance while the Iraqi forces are getting fully trained) doesn't seem to have caused Rumsfeld a moment's pause.

A utilitarian who either initially opposed the Iraq invasion or who has already concluded it's time to start cutting our losses might argue that Bush (as a Republican) is better positioned to execute a near-term drawdown of forces than Kerry. The betting would be that Bush's credibility gap, which will continue to widen after November, will sooner rather than later push him down the Novak road.

By contrast, Kerry would have a difficult time executing a drawdown policy because he would need a coalition of the "anti-war" group and a significant majority of the utilitarians. Kerry would have a difficult time attracting those utilitarians who believe the primary problem has been failure to wage the war properly, either because of insufficient troop levels or an over-reluctance to take the fight to the enemy. This group is likely to blame future bad news at least in part on Kerry's policies. And the "war on terror" group will remain vocal opponents of even contemplating withdrawal. For Bush, those latter two groups are more likely to be members of his own party and he will therefore be in a better position to manage their opposition to drawdown policies. Kerry, under the most favorable scenario where the Democrats win the Senate, would face a highly-partisan Republican-controlled House, which would be happy to hold every piece of foreign policy hostage to domestic legislation and vice versa.

Regardless of the victor in November, it will be fascinating to watch the evolution of American public opinion. I agree with you completely that Raban will have a hard time twisting the future story into his Puritan script.

UPDATE [10-12-04 12:40PM] by nadezhda
I really should have given a bit more description of what Andrew Cline is up to. His blog is both highly entertaining and insightful -- see e.g. the entry on Cheney's "I've never met you before tonight" ploy in the Edwards debate. But the blog is only part of Cline's larger Rhetorica Network site that includes a load of media links, a rhetoric primer, a compendium of rhetoric terms and methods as an aid to critical analysis of journalistic and political messages, links to an assortment of academic blogs, and a new venture to give journalists access to expert bloggers to help them do research for stories. Cline also has several big-picture essays that should not be overlooked.

[A] new USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll found that 42% of those surveyed thought the former Iraqi leader was involved in the attacks on New York City and Washington.

In response to another question, 32% said they thought Saddam had personally planned them.

The same poll in June showed that 56% of all Republicans said they thought Saddam was involved with the 9/11 attacks. In the latest poll that number actually climbs, to 62%.

**** See below the differential between Bush's approval on "terrorism" and "the situation in Iraq." These numbers are from March, early May and immediately after the Republican Convention. I haven't found the data from updated internals, but I have seen several references to this pattern becoming more noticeable and the biggest shift in Kerry's internals after the first debate being on "the situation in Iraq." The much-ballyhooed and much-maligned "security mom" analysis is based mostly on this differential, where the gender gap that usually prefers Democrats was especially small or non-existent on the question of "protection against terrorism."

"Regardless of which presidential candidate you support, please tell me if you think John Kerry or George W. Bush would better handle each of the following issues. How about [see below]?"

March 5-7 60% vs 54%
May 7-9 55% vs 48%
Sept 3-5 61% vs 54%

March 5-7 33% vs 39%
May 7-9 38% vs 45%
Sept 3-5 34% vs 41%