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President Jimmy Carter's failure to acheive popular support for his foreign policy is commonly attributed to his disregard of public opinion. The author evaluates this perception by examining the Carter administration's use of polls in the areas of human rights and U.S.-Soviet relations. Archival material confirms that Carter did not ignore public opinion; rather, his polling operation did not provide the White House with a complete and objective portrait of public attitudes. Carter's team assumed that public opinion on foreign policy was malleable and lacked structure. Thus, no effort was made to determine whether the contradictions pollsters found on the surface were actually held together by an underlying structure. Therefore, the Carter White House had neither an accurate guage of public attitudes nor an understanding of those attitudes sufficient to build support for its policies.
One of President Jimmy Carter's more memorable promises was to conduct a foreign policy "that the American people both support . and know about and understand (Carter 1977, 955). Ironically, Carter's foreign policy was neither supported nor understood by much of the public.1 What explains the inability of Carter to build popular support for his foreign policy? Contrary to widespread perception, Carter's difficulties with public opinion were not caused by his inattention to public opinion polls or ineptitude in public relations. Rather, I argue that Carter's inability to gain popular approval for his foreign policy resulted from a misinterpretation of the nature of post-Vietnam War (hereafter post-Vietnam) public opinion. The conventional understanding of the public opinion-foreign policy relationship prior to the Carter administration was that the president could lead public opinion through the use of the bully pulpit, for example. One key problem for Carter was that presidential leadership of public opinion had become problematic owing to the breakdown of elite consensus on foreign policy and greater public awareness of foreign policy issues.
By any measure, Carter was an unpopular president. His average presidential approval rating in the Gallup poll was 47 percent, lower than all his predecessors since Harry Truman.2 On foreign policy, some specific initiatives of Carter's earned high marks, but the public did not offer a ringing endorsement of his overall handling of international affairs. Figure 1 charts approval for Carter's foreign policy in the CBS...