"Is the American public ready for war?" he asked.
I don't see a European public ready to bolster defense spending, but the need is there.
In the months that followed, he worked to soften public opinion in the North — to get the public ready for the fact that he intended to free some slaves.
Massive investments of blood and treasure in Iraq did not impose order on that unhappy country: nobody thinks the American public ready to spend anything like as much on Syria, so why should American "leadership" prove as magical as outsiders seem to think.Show that intervention would not make things worse, has been Mr Obama's question from the start.
By 2010, when the Museum of Modern Art presented a four-decade survey, "The Artist is Present," of Marina Abramovic's work, there was no longer any doubt that there was a broad public ready to accept the idea of crossover, non-genre specific live art — and even more people were prepared to be fascinated by the charismatic Ms. Abramovic.
Her sunny and optimistic disposition was expertly marketed by her minders, then sold to a Thai public ready for a break from the male-dominated and violent politics of the last few years.But she was not required to do much either, other than smile and rehearse her sound bites.
Well, does the term hogwash mean anything to you? Prime Minister Ehud Barak's courageous decision to unilaterally withdraw Israeli forces from Lebanon has, for the first time in 22 years, restored a clear-cut border between Lebanon and Israel, and that will only leave Israel with a tighter fist and a more unified public, ready to protect what is really important.
But is the public ready and has it the appetite for the rallying cry from a 21st Century Citizen Smith?
So has Google bitten off more than it can chew and is the public ready for computing that relies so heavily on the cloud?
But is the public ready to be VR guinea pigs?
