Abstract
President George W. Bush received a historic rally in American public support following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The opinion rally was so unprecedented that it took over two years for President Bush’s approval rating to finally descend back to pre-9/11 levels. The media, in particular, played a critical role in rallying public opinion around President Bush, the administration’s leadership and policy agenda.
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We coded coverage of Democratic partisan opposition, yet there were also some instances of bipartisan criticism of presidential policy, which are found to be particularly damaging to presidential evaluation. See Benjamin Page, Robert Shapiro, and Glen Dempsey, “What Moves Public Opinion?” American Political Science Review 81 (1987), 38–40.
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Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones, Agendas and Instability in American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
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© 2004 Jon Kraus, Kevin J. McMahon, and David M. Rankin
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Rankin, D.M. (2004). The Press, the Public, and the Two Presidencies of George W. Bush. In: Kraus, J., McMahon, K.J., Rankin, D.M. (eds) Transformed by Crisis. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-06449-3_4
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