What in heaven's name was Camilla wearing on her head at her wedding to Prince Charles last month? It looked like a porcupine. A rather large and angry porcupine. I can just imagine, when it came time to sign the license, the royal bridegroom reaching over and plucking out a quill to write with.
I suppose that people who know about these things might have found her spiny chapeau daringly chic, if not avant-garde, but to me it almost seemed as if the new Duchess of Cornwall went out of her way to live up to the unflattering comparisons the world has made for years between her and her late predecessor, the beauteous (and practically beatified) Princess Diana.
Well, maybe she did. Maybe this was her way of saying she didn't give two pence what the rest of the world thought of her.
In view of events of the past few years, one might almost conjecture that the United States has taken to wearing a porcupine on its head. This issue of Public Opinion Pros veers temporarily away from our usual America-centric approach to public opinion to take a look at what people in other countries think of us. In our lead story, "To See Ourselves as Others See Us," political scientist Ole R. Holsti examines trends in foreign opinion toward the United States since 9/11, concluding that U.S. policies since then have affected our nation's influence in world affairs—and not for the better.
In their article placing American opinion in a crossnational context, Russell J. Dalton and Steven Weldon find more similarities than differences in patterns of opinion toward political parties, with implications for the functioning of democracy not just in the United States, but in other Western societies as well.
And Matthew Warshaw describes the challenges survey researchers encounter in the field when the field is the unfamiliar, sometimes hostile environment of Afghanistan.
In other articles, Nat Ehrlich takes on the question of how best to determine survey respondents' political orientation, while an essay by John White from a forthcoming book on progressive politics examines the role of values in the fortunes of the Democratic Party, and an op-ed by Michael Bocian deals with that same subject from the perspective of the senior vote.
From the standpoint of public opinion, how much has really changed in the place the United States occupies in the world since that terrible September day in 2001? It is impossible to say anything definitive.
But in the midsummer of that year, as Al-Qaeda terrorists busied themselves taking surveillance flights on U.S. airlines and finishing up their pilot training, 49 percent of Americans told the Pew Research Center. they were following very or fairly closely news stories about the disappearance of Washington intern Chandra Levy; 73 percent were glued to reports of a Houston woman allegedly drowning her five children. A total of 27 percent said they were paying attention to President George W. Bush's trip to Europe to attend the G-8 summit in Genoa.
By way of contrast, this past February, 56 percent told Pew they were following very or fairly closely news stories about North Korea's nuclear weapons program; fully 83 percent were watching the current situation in Iraq.
For better or, if the data speak truly, for worse, relations have changed between the United States and the other countries with whom we share our planet. But at least it seems we are paying more attention to what is going on beyond our borders; and one might argue that a duchess wearing an ugly hat sure beats the emperor having no clothes at all.
—Lisa
Ferraro Parmelee, Editor |
