There was no shortage of policy-related events during the postwar years. Some of these were the result of self-conscious interventions by political elites. Presidents and congressmen, in particular, constantly offered new programmatic suggestions in the realms of welfare, foreign, race, and social policy. These were the autonomous efforts by political actors to change public policy and, through it, public life; they are the stuff of “policy initiation” as we normally conceive it. Yet there were other policy-related events that were quite different. They involved developments external to this ongoing politics, even potential public crises, that appeared to demand some policy response or at least forced a decision about responding. Every one of these could also have slotted into – or become – the dominant substantive influence of its day. Said differently, every one could variously have stimulated or responded to, shaped or been shaped by, ongoing public preferences in their respective realms.

And indeed there were such preferences. That is the inescapable message of Part I of this book. Any given individual could still lack either an ongoing opinion structure in a given policy realm or any opinion at all on a given event of the day, just as any individual could assert opinions that then proved so labile, so malleable in response to policy substance or even question wording, that they could not possibly serve as a basis for responding to the issue context of American politics.