Refusing to Turn on a Dime

Every once in a while, a piece of data crosses your desk that causes you to scratch your head. That happened to me when I saw the most recent Newsweek poll. Even though U.S. military and Iraq civilian casualties have been declining for several months and even though people in Washington are starting to feel that things have finally stabilized and may even be improving in Iraq, the poll, conducted last week, shows that 29 percent of registered voters think that the situation in Iraq is getting worse, 26 percent think that it's getting better, and 42 percent say it is staying about the same. My reaction to that is, "Wow."

To be sure, there may be less here than meets the eye. This is just one poll, and the American people cannot be expected to change their opinions on a dime. But these results serve as a reminder that public opinion is like a gigantic ocean liner, very slow to turn. People did not form their attitudes toward the war in Iraq overnight, and they will not change them quickly. Moreover, the 3-point difference between the "getting worse" and "getting better" responses is statistically insignificant. (The survey of 1,002 registered voters has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.)

Republicans should take some solace from the fact that in the previous Newsweek poll on this subject in early August, 41 percent of respondents said that the situation in Iraq was getting worse, just 16 percent said that it was getting better, and 38 percent said that things were the same. A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.

Politically, perhaps it doesn't matter much whether the situation in Iraq actually improves, because a majority of the American people have already judged the war to be both a bad idea and poorly executed. (Most Americans also believe that the rank-and-file U.S. military men and women who have served there have done so ably and courageously, and that strategic mistakes were the fault of civilian leaders or military higher-ups.) But the decline in the number of people who say that things are getting worse in Iraq means that a gigantic political problem has at least stopped growing.

To the extent that Iraq becomes less of a front-and-center news story, Iran and its potential nuclear capabilities may become more of one. Most Americans don't quite know what to think about Iran or about what we can or should do to stop its leaders from developing a nuclear arsenal.

The mere mention of Iran drives many Americans -- especially those of the more-liberal anti-Bush persuasion -- to distraction. They are convinced that President Bush and Vice President Cheney are determined to attack Iran.

Leaving those people aside, how would the majority of Americans react to such an attack, and what would be the implications for the 2008 elections? The short answer is, we don't really know.

One of the smartest guys covering American politics is Jeff Greenfield, who recently left CNN to become a senior political correspondent for CBS News. He argues that one reason former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani does as well as he does among cultural and religious conservatives is that they see the 9/11 attacks, the war in Iraq, and, by extension, probably Iran as all part of a struggle between the Judeo-Christian West and the radical Muslim East. They view Giuliani as the point man for the West in that struggle between good and evil, a titanic contest of biblical proportions.

As a result, many of these conservatives may be willing to give him a pass on some of his supposed heresies on cultural issues and on his personal transgressions.

It is certainly plausible to say that Mitt Romney's campaign would be very happy if the race for the Republican nomination focuses on balancing the budget and managing the business of governing. But if the focus is security, whether from terrorism or from more-traditional foreign threats, Giuliani's campaign would probably be delighted.

The eventual Democratic presidential nominee, on the other hand, would like Americans to keep their focus on Iraq during the general election -- and any Republican nominee other than Ron Paul would likely hate that.