> Are foreign policy questions the really decisive ones in the US
> politics?
Not for average Americans, usually. 9/11 brought about a rather unusual situation, in which Americans who previously paid almost no attention to the outside world suddenly realized that there was one, and that it could be rather upsetting. Now, with a shooting war going on, there may well be a rise in the percentage of Americans who could find Iraq on a world map, though I doubt whether it is in shouting distance of 50% yet.
In general, most Americans have a very paranoid view of the outer world -- they only notice it when it seems to threaten them, as Japan did some years ago when it was feared that it would become "No. 1," and as the "Islamic terrorists" do now, as well as the countries to which jobs are putatively being "outsourced." Intellectual leftists, on the other hand, tend to neglect domestic politics, especially the problems of the poor, because they generally have benefited by expensive educations, often including some training in foreign languages, live in comfortable circumstances, and have little inclination to worry about the domestic economy as long as their mutual funds are doing all right. (Yes, even a lefties -- a considerable proportion of them -- have mutual fund investments.)
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________________________ It isn’t that we believe in God, or don’t believe in God, or have suspended judgment about God, or consider that the God of theism is an inadequate symbol of our ultimate concern; it is just that we wish we didn’t have to have a view about God. It isn’t that we know that “God” is a cognitively meaningless expression, or that it has its role in a language-game other than fact-stating, or whatever. We just regret the fact that the word is used so much.
— Richard Rorty