President May Have Boosted Support for War

Public opinion polls conducted after Tuesday night's speech showed measurable gains in support for the president. And in Congress, Bush won praise from some influential Democrats and previously nervous Republicans, as well as renewed pledges of support from longtime backers.

At the same time, some analysts cautioned that the gains could prove transitory.

"Certainly, it was the most articulate presentation of his case he's made," said Benjamin Page, a Northwestern University specialist in public opinion. "But it's likely to be a temporary bounce. People know in their gut that this could be jumping off a cliff. Nobody really knows what will happen" if U.S. forces invade Iraq.

At least for the moment, though, Bush seems to have recaptured the initiative in the struggle for popular and political support.

In part, the gains came from his announcement that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell would go to the United Nations next week and lay out new evidence that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's regime continues to pursue an illegal-weapons program and has links to terrorist groups.

The pledge, reiterated in a closed-door briefing for House members Wednesday, brought a palpable sigh of relief from lawmakers in both parties who have been uneasy about the administration's stated willingness to act against Iraq without broad support from allies.

"I was pleased to hear that Powell was going to the U.N. next week," Sen. Charles Hagel (R-Neb.) said. "That means we're going to stay in that track."

In addition, some specialists in presidential leadership said Bush helped himself by abandoning the tough but seemingly glib rhetoric of recent days about the U.N. weapons inspection process in Iraq -- remarks such as, "This looks like a rerun of a bad movie, and I'm not interested in watching it."

Instead, the president used the State of the Union to return to the grave, reasoned language most of his predecessors have relied on to call the nation to war.

"After 9/11, the rhetoric of frontier justice satisfied a deep need in the American public. Saying, 'We will hunt them down,' or, 'Wanted, dead or alive' -- it enacted a fantasy of uncomplicated, swift, and total retribution," said James Page of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., and author of a new book on presidential language and leadership.