A Peek Under the PR Mask

Once in a blue moon, we actually get a peek under the White House's public-relations mask, and this morning it comes courtesy of Peter Baker and Dan Balz , whose front-pager in The Washington Post suggests that Bush's unflagging public confidence about his Iraq policy reflects the work of public opinion researchers.

Yes, the very same White House that outwardly exudes contempt for polls has in fact recently hired a prominent academic pollster onto the National Security Council staff and has concluded that the key to public support for the war is not the number of casualties in Iraq, nor whether the war was right or wrong -- but whether people feel like we're going to win.

Baker and Balz write: "When President Bush confidently predicts victory in Iraq and admits no mistakes, admirers see steely resolve and critics see exasperating stubbornness. But the president's full-speed-ahead message articulated in this week's prime-time address also reflects a purposeful strategy based on extensive study of public opinion about how to maintain support for a costly and problem-plagued military mission.

"The White House recently brought onto its staff one of the nation's top academic experts on public opinion during wartime, whose studies are now helping Bush craft his message two years into a war with no easy end in sight. Behind the president's speech is a conviction among White House officials that the battle for public opinion on Iraq hinges on their success in convincing Americans that, whatever their views of going to war in the first place, the conflict there must and can be won. . . .

"In shaping their message, White House officials have drawn on the work of Duke University political scientists Peter D. Feaver and Christopher F. Gelpi, who have examined public opinion on Iraq and previous conflicts. Feaver, who served on the staff of the National Security Council in the early years of the Clinton administration, joined the Bush NSC staff about a month ago as special adviser for strategic planning and institutional reform."

In his academic life, Feaver wasn't media shy. And his colleague Gelpi, still an academic, isn't operating under White House messaging protocol.

Gelpi told Baker and Balz, for instance, that he thinks the president did not truly achieve what he needed to with Tuesday's speech.

"What's important for him now to keep the public with him is to look forward and say we're going to make progress and this is what progress looks like," Gelpi said. "He may have stemmed the flow for a little bit, but I don't think he's given the public a framework for showing how we're making progress."

And Feaver and Gelpi both have quite a paper trail. There was, for instance, the controversial 1999 article in The Post's Outlook section , in which they described poll results showing that the public would consider up to 30,000 deaths in Iraq to be an acceptable number.

Feaver and Gelpi co-authored this article , published just a few weeks ago: "We find that -- while the public is rightly averse to suffering casualties -- the level of popular sensitivity to US military casualties depends critically on the context in which those losses occur. Our core argument is that the public's tolerance for the human costs of war is primarily shaped by the intersection of two crucial attitudes: beliefs about the rightness or wrongness of the war in the first place, and beliefs about the war's likely success. Both attitudes are important, and the impact of each depends upon the other. However, we find that beliefs about the likelihood of success matter most in determining the public's willingness to tolerate American military deaths in combat . . .

"The Iraq case suggests that under the right conditions, the public will continue to support military operations even when they come with a relatively high human cost."

Several months into the war, Thomas E. Ricks wrote in The Washington Post that Feaver had just briefed White House and other administration officials: "'First, worry less about persuading the American people he really did the right thing, and more about ensuring that the mission is going to be successful -- and persuading the American people of that,' he said.