Dear Josh, Andy and fellow cafe denizens:

The topic of the alleged disconnect between the foreign policy community and the public is getting a lot of attention lately, here, and at Yglesias and Greenwald as examples.

I'd like to request that the authors of the 2006 book The Foreign Policy Disconnect, Benjamin I. Page and Marshall M. Bouton, be invited to partake here for a week.

Their book presents results of surveys of the public done by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations (now the Chicago Council on World Affairs) quadrennially from 1974 through 2006 on a wide range of foreign policy questions, as well as survey data from foreign policy elites.

The data does indeed show long-standing disconnects on many major foreign policy issues. But I would prefer that the authors themselves present the data in lieu of summarizing them myself.

It would be helpful, I think, to try to ground this discussion in data going back much farther than the current presidential campaign and the Iraq war to insert more context and perspective. Is this a short-term, fleeting phenomenon or is it more enduring? On which issues are there the greatest disconnects?

The Page/Bouton book is an important marker in this debate.

Thank you for listening.