The Problem with Gitmo
This last week we received word that the White House is “regrouping” as the deadline to close the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay looms. This is an unsurprising and fully predictable turn of events. Indeed, the manner in which Obama’s Gitmo policy has unfolded since his inauguration tells a story of the revelatory nature of public opinion polling and its ensuing role in political decision making.
Shortly after the November election, TargetPoint conducted a forward looking post-election study in which we measured approval of the incoming president’s policy agenda and found the closure of Guantanamo Bay to be the second most divisive issue across more than forty legislative items (behind only national health care).
Measured on a 0-10 scale, approval of Gitmo’s closure averaged out to a 5.17, almost precisely middle-of the road. However, this seeming moderation masked a massive partisan polarization: Republican approval averaged to 2.22, Independents at 5.20, and Democrats 8.21. Moreover, the Independent approval rating suffered from a high standard deviation (a measure of the dispersion, or spread, of the responses; a higher standard deviation indicates less consensus on the question).
The survey also asked respondents what they thought the likelihood of the legislative item actually occurring was (again on a 0-10 scale). Closing Gitmo had the highest average likelihood across all items at 8.03 (and the lowest standard deviation, meaning there was broad agreement on this point).
To summarize then, as Barack Obama took the oath of the office here is where the American public stood on Gitmo:
- There was already broad agreement that Obama would close the facility.
- BUT, there was no consensus regarding the policy’s actual merit.
- BUT, the one group that strongly approved was his base, partisan Democrats.
It’s unsurprising then that one of the President’s first actions in office was his announcement that he would close Gitmo in a year’s time. It satisfied the liberal base, while surprising no one. But it appears that the administration misjudged the public’s expectation that it would be closed as actual approval of the closure – White House counsel Gregory Craig, the administration’s steward of the Gitmo closure, said “I thought there was, in fact, and I may have been wrong, a broad consensus about the importance to our national security objectives to close Guantanamo.”
Of course, now, as the deadline quickly approaches, hard decisions must be made, most consequentially about where to put the detainees. The revelation of plans to move some detainees to suburban Virginia, rural Michigan and Leavenworth, Kansas increased the issue’s salience with voters nearly overnight, peeling back the middle-of-the-road mask this issue wore to reveal the ugly divisiveness underneath.
In November and December we warned that Obama would likely try to close Gitmo as one of his first presidential acts, but that its divisiveness and the Democrats’ distance from the rest of the country on this issue could have serious political repercussions. This week we have seen the early rumblings of this political showdown. It remains to be seen how this ends, but for now it underscores the power and influence of public opinion and the insights to be gained from measuring and interpreting it accurately.
- Alex Lundry
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