Robert Starks, a 60-year-old political science professor at Northeastern Illinois University, labeled US President George W. Bush's answers to reporters' questions "vapid, confusing and evasive." He called Bush "an abomination to a great nation."
But Dennis Nelson, commander of an American Legion post in Tampa, Florida, said Bush was exactly as he needed to be in his prime-time address to the nation Tuesday: strong, direct and resolute that the US will finish the job in Iraq, no matter what.
In bars, restaurants and living rooms across the country, Americans tuned in to watch the president's press conference, which followed one of the bloodiest periods in the US occupation of Iraq.
Starks watched in Chicago with about 20 members of the Task Force for Black Political Empowerment, a political activist group against the Iraq war.
Nelson, a 51-year-old Vietnam veteran and a Republican, watched at the Legion hall with other veterans and the veterans' families. He lauded Bush for standing firm, despite increasing instability in Iraq and polls showing fewer Americans approve of the way he's handling the war.
In San Francisco, freelance photographer Tom Erikson, 42, said it angered him to watch the president invoke the memories of the American soldiers who have died thus far.
"The schmaltzy, false sorrow is the most revolting thing to me," Erikson said.
"It's crocodile tears when you hear him crying over the dead when he is the one who caused their deaths," Erikson said.
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