The Public, the President, and the War in Iraq.

Americans have been more widely divided by party in their evaluations of George W. Bush than they have been about any president in the more than fifty years the approval question has been polled. They are also more widely divided by party about the wisdom and necessity of his Iraq war than they have been about any major U.S. military action undertaken during the same time span. These two phenomena are closely related, yet the structure of their relationship is far from transparent. In this paper, I review a selection of the inordinately abundant survey data on the president and the Iraq war to document the polarization in public attitudes they have jointly provoked and to explore some of the questions the data can be used to address concerning the formation, evolution, and consequences of mass opinion on the war. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]