Fox News Poll: Few Americans Blame Bush
Thursday, June 06, 2002
By Dana Blanton
Amid agency finger pointing and congressional committee hearings, Americans are divided on where to place the blame for failure to prevent the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
In the latest FOX News/Opinion Dynamics poll, slightly more blame the FBI than the CIA (13 to 9 percent), and a generous 13 percent say no one is to blame for failure to prevent the attacks. Only a handful of Americans place the fault directly on President George Bush (6 percent); in fact, twice as many blame former President Clinton (12 percent).
Bush's job rating remains strong with 74 percent saying they approve of the job he's doing as president. On handling the war on terrorism, his ratings have slipped over the last few months with 73 percent approving Bush's handling of terrorism today, down from a high of 89 percent in January and from 78 percent a month ago.
Overall, the strength of confidence in the country's handling of terrorism has declined. Those feeling "absolutely confident" in the US's ability to handle the problem of terrorism dropped to 19 percent, down from 36 percent following the attacks in September.
Moreover, 12 percent say they have no confidence in the government’s efforts — up from only 4 percent who took that view last September. "It seems clear that the recent revelations about how various government agencies handled pre-9/11 intelligence information has made some Americans re-assess their level of confidence in our anti-terror efforts," said Ernest Paicopolos, a principal of Opinion Dynamics Corporation.
Not surprisingly, the issue of terrorism is frequently on the minds of most people. About one-third of those polled said they think about terrorism or terrorist attacks at least once a day (13 percent said "several times a day"). In addition, 25 percent said they believe their "life is in danger due to terrorism," and 40 percent said it is likely they would move if their city was a presumed terrorist target.
A solid majority (66 percent) approves of the expanded FBI surveillance rules that Attorney General John Ashcroft recently announced. The new rules give agents working on detecting or preventing terrorism more leeway in several surveillance areas. Americans seem comfortable with the FBI's spying duties. Over five times as many respondents (71 percent) said they were more worried about the FBI "not spying enough on terrorists" than they were about the agency spying on them personally (13 percent).
Seventy percent of the public said they think most of their fellow Americans are willing to do "whatever is necessary" to defeat terrorism. Slightly fewer, 64 percent, said they themselves would be willing to give up some personal freedom in order to reduce terrorism (down from 71 percent in October).
Americans think the biggest terrorist threat right now is chemical or biological weapons (29 percent), followed by suicide bombings (16 percent), infected water/food supplies (12 percent), tactical nuclear weapons (10 percent), and car bombs (10 percent). Separately, 16 percent expect a terrorist to detonate a nuclear device in the United States in less than a year and another 23 percent think it will happen in the next one to five years.
When asked which of two extreme possibilities might happen first, a large minority (45 percent) said they thought a human being would be cloned before a nuclear bomb would be exploded in wartime (28 percent).
Polling was conducted by telephone June 4-5, 2002 in the evenings. The sample is 900 registered voters nationwide with a margin of error of ± 3 percentage points.
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