Reading the Public: How Members of Congress Develop Their Im- Pressions of Public Opinion on National Security

ABSTRACT Title of Document: READING THE PUBLIC: HOW MEMBERS OF CONGRESS DEVELOP THEIR IM- PRESSIONS OF PUBLIC OPINION ON NATIONAL SECURITY Jeremy David Rosner, Ph.D., 2007 Directed By: Dr. I. M. Destler, School of Public Policy To “represent” literally means to present again. For members of Congress, that means presenting again the views their constituents have presented to them. But how do members of Congress determine what those views are? How does a member of Congress read the public, in particular, on questions of national security, where the stakes are particularly high, but where average citizens may be silent, inattentive, or deferential to policy makers? The current study examines this question – how members of Congress develop their impressions of public opinion on national security issues – through a process of inter- views and participant observation with members of Congress and their staff. It examines the information-gathering methods of eight members – six representatives and two senators – as well as their chiefs of staff, focusing in particular on three case studies: the Iraq war, especially congressional votes during 2005-2007; the sale of six American port operations to the Dubai Ports World company in early 2006; and U.S. relations with China. The study concludes that members rely on more sources of information about public opinion on national security than the literature has suggested. For example, members do not only look at intentional and issue-linear communications they receive from the public. They tend to be hunter-gatherers for information, and they seek out clues the public did not know it was transmitting. Members also look at public opinion in a highly anticipatory manner – reading the public’s preferences not only in the here- and-now, but also as they may evolve. And whereas the literature tends to equate public opinion with public opinion polls, which weight every individual’s opinion equally, members appear to view opinion in “lumpy” terms, assigning very different weights to the opinions of different kinds of people. All this helps to explain why there are sometimes divergences between the polls and members’ perceptions of public opinion. Ultimately, it also suggests the need for a broader understanding of public opinion, which takes into account not only quantitative polling data, but also the qualitative perceptions of practitioners such as members of Congress, whose job it is to assess the contours of public attitudes. READING THE PUBLIC: HOW MEMBERS OF CONGRESS DEVELOP THEIR IMPRESSIONS OF PUBLIC OPINION ON NATIONAL SECURITY By Jeremy David Rosner Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2007 Advisory Committee: Professor I. M. Destler, Chair Professor William A. Galston Professor Ernest J. Wilson, III Professor Ivo Daalder Professor James Lindsay © Copyright by Jeremy David Rosner 2007 To my mother and father, Josephine Lori Rosner and Arnold Stanley Rosner ii iii Introduction and Acknowledgements This study grew out of a set of questions that took root in my mind during the 1990s, when I was serving on the staff of the Clinton National Security Council, and then as an Special Adviser to the President and Secretary of State. At the NSC, as head of the Legislative Affairs office, I would sometimes get the request from National Security Adviser Anthony Lake or his Deputy, Samuel "Sandy" Berger," to call in some members of Congress for a meeting, in part so that they and the President could get a better fix on what the public was thinking about the national security issues we were ad- dressing. Having worked on the Hill, I was inclined to believe that members of Con- gress had a pretty good reading on what the public thought on such issues. And yet, the question began to nag at me: how do we know that? Why do we think that members of Congress have a better sense of where the public is on these issues than, say, public opinion polls? Later in the 1990s, that question took sharper form when two acquaintances – public opinion analyst Steven Kull, and Professor I. M. "Mac" Destler at the University of Maryland, where I had begun my doctoral coursework after leaving the NSC – launched a study to examine whether members of Congress and other national security policy practitioners were "misreading the public" by believing that Americans had become highly resistant to foreign aid, multilateral peacekeeping operations, and other forms of cooperative engagement abroad. Steve and Mac were kind enough to invite me to participate in their roundtable discussions on that question during early iv 1996, and I laid out some arguments about why I sensed members of Congress were a good reflection of the public on such issues. Yet when I read the book that ultimately resulted from their inquiry, I felt my assertions did not adequately answer their well- argued case. I had new reason to ponder all this when I returned to the Administration in 1997-98 as Special Adviser, assigned to gain Senate approval of the treaty that would add Po- land, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to NATO. My job was to help the administration make the case to the public and Congress that turning these three former communist states into treaty allies would improve America’s security. My team and I pursued all sorts of activities to do that – from mobilizing veterans groups and ethnic communities, to appearing on local cable television shows, to speaking to small groups of students at universities in the states of key senators. The effort was fasci- nating and ultimately successful. Yet I emerged from it feeling that I really had little sense of what the Senators had heard about the issue, or from whom, by the time 80 of them ultimately decided to vote for the treaty in April 1998. I started thinking about these questions in new ways when in May of 1998 I myself became a practicing pollster, joining the firm of an old political friend, Stanley Greenberg. Some of the work that I did at our firm focused on attitudes of the American public toward national security issues and, like Kull and Destler, I was often struck by the divergences between what the numbers told me and what I heard from Capitol Hill about these issues. But now I was wearing a different professional v hat, and the kind of confidence I had earlier felt about Congress's perceptions was challenged by the polls I myself was now conducting. So what explained the diver- gence? The inquiry that resulted from those experiences is contained in the pages that follow. But it sure took a long time to complete. I began my doctoral studies at Maryland in 1995, during my break between the NSC and the NATO effort, and am only finishing them now, some 12 years later. That means, as Mac Destler has often chided, that my doctoral work did not only last more thin a decade; it actually spanned two millennia. The fact that it took so long to complete this work is my own doing, resulting from the decision to juggle full-time political consulting and part-time doctoral studies. But the fact that I was able to undertake this work at all, and then complete it, owes a pro- found debt of gratitude to many individuals. The list starts with Tony Lake, Sandy Berger, Madeleine Albright, Strobe Talbott, and of course President Bill Clinton – the people who gave me the great privilege of serving in their administration, National Security Council staff, and State Department. It was always an honor to work for them, and with them. I owe an equal debt to the members of my dissertation committee – Mac Destler, Wil- liam Galston, Ivo Daalder, Ernest Wilson, and James Lindsay. Mac early on was willing to entertain my crazy proposal to pursue this effort on a part-time basis, and he invested a great deal of time and advice, drawing on his deep understanding of vi Congress and national security policy, to help guide that crazy idea through to frui- tion. On top of all that, he was willing to oversee a dissertation that basically engaged in an extended debate with a book he had co-authored. He constantly helped me sharpen the argument, but never counseled against making it. I have had the pleasure of working for and with Bill Galston in various jobs since 1984, when he was Policy Director for Vice President Walter Mondale's presidential campaign and I was a cub speechwriter. I have always admired his mix of intellectual ferocity and personal gen- erosity, qualities that made working with him – through my political philosophy coursework and the arguments in this study – both intimidating and rewarding. I came to know Daalder, Lindsay, and Wilson partly from my work at the NSC, where they all worked at various points, and also from my studies at Maryland, where Daalder was one of my first professors, and Wilson's and Lindsay's writings were among my first readings. I have felt enormously fortunate to have such an outstanding circle of scholar-practitioners to guide and evaluate my work. I thank each of them for the contributions they have made to my understanding of these issues – and for not giving up on me during this over-long process. My thanks go out, as well, to one person who guided my doctoral aspirations for even longer. Dr. Elliot J. Feldman has been a key part of my scholarly development ever since I strolled into his class on political science field research at Brandeis University in the Fall of 1977.

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