How Common Ground of 9/11 Gave Way to Partisan Split

After watching the news broadcasts, participants answered a survey that measured their attitudes toward Bush, the campaign against terrorism, the war in Iraq and the economy, as well as views on the two political parties and prominent Republican and Democratic leaders. By looking for differences in the way respondents who saw different news broadcasts responded to the survey questions, Iyengar could estimate the impact of each visual image on political attitudes.

What the experiments showed is that, even five years after the attacks, the image of the Twin Towers under attack has lingering effects on the public's political attitudes on a range of security-related questions. Those who were shown the Twin Towers video tended to be less hostile toward the president's handling of terrorism than was a separate group that did not see the same video.

"We went in with the expectation that people would have had so much exposure to 9/11 over the past five years that another 30 seconds of watching the same old video would not add very much," Iyengar said. "It turns out that reminding people of 9/11 modifies their opinions on a variety of issues."

The Twin Towers imagery also affected how Americans assess the causes of terrorism. The experiment found that 53 percent of Democrats who saw the video said Islamic extremism was extremely important in causing terrorism, compared with 40 percent of Democrats in a control group, who saw no video. Those in the control group were more likely to cite poverty and political oppression as causing terrorism than were those who saw the Twin Towers video.

By way of contrast, images of the war in Iraq failed to change attitudes. Whether images of success (the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue) or setbacks (U.S. or Iraqi casualties), the videos did not affect views about the war, about Bush, about the upcoming election. After more than three years of daily reporting from Iraq, public opinion now is difficult to sway.

"Seeing a small clip about something in Iraq, they say, 'I already know this,' " Iyengar said.

Economic images, however, demonstrated considerable power -- greater than the video of the Twin Towers, but strictly limited to attitudes about the state of the national economy and personal finances.

Different groups were shown images either of bad news (rising gasoline prices) or good news (jobs growth). Among those who saw the reports of gas prices, 42 percent said their family is worse off than a year ago, compared with 29 percent of those who saw the good news video. The spread was even greater among independents. Those who saw the gas prices video also were more pessimistic about the national economy.

"I wasn't expecting the kind of effect we found on the economy, particularly because those are really large effects, on the order of magnitude of 10 percentage points," Iyengar said. "Given what we know about the impact of perceptions of the economy on voting, those are consequential effects."

Reversion to Partisanship

---

Could the reversion to the partisanship that prevailed before Sept. 11 have been averted by different presidential leadership?

One view comes from Lee H. Hamilton, the former Democratic congressman from Indiana who was co-chairman of the commission that investigated the events that led up to 9/11 and recommended sweeping changes in America's counterterrorism strategy and organization.

"You would not expect the massive unity we saw in the immediate aftermath of the attacks to continue indefinitely," Hamilton said in an interview. "But you would also not expect it to dissipate as quickly as it did. The president could have consulted more with Congress and with allies, and generally been more inclusive, rather than expand executive power as much as he did. Rather than go off on his own on Guantanamo and national surveillance, he could have done a lot more to maintain unity. But he would not have been entirely successful, even under the best of circumstances."