Poll-Axed

If the Presidential election were held today, it might end up in a worse muddle than Bush-Gore in 2000. Gallup tells us Hillary Clinton can beat any Republican, while Zogby reports she is trailing five of them in their polling.

With a year to go, it's safe to say Americans are undecided--safe but how useful? With a flood of statistics from all directions, nationally and in early primary states, are polls turning the process into a numbers game that obscures the issues?

If that sounds stuffy, or even Luddite, consider the checkered history of Presidential polls. In 1936, the Literary Digest famously predicted Alf Landon would beat FDR, but he lost every state except Maine and Vermont. The mistake was asking voters who had cars and telephones, not a fair cross-section of the whole population back then.

Sampling is more sophisticated now but on election night 2000, we were whipsawed by exit polls from the Voters News Service that reported Gore winning Florida and the White House and then maybe not.

What can we believe? Gallup polls by phone, Zogby "surveys individuals who have registered to take part in online polls," but does it make any difference?

What does matter is that politicians and public may be getting too mesmerized by the numbers and, based on their fallible evidence, making "electability" the main issue instead of substantive differences among the candidates.

Those who like horse races can get a better run for their money at the race track rather than the voting booth.

Media Mistrust: The Tipping Point

According to the latest Gallup Poll, Americans passed a milestone four years ago and have never looked back: More than half of us now have little or no confidence that mass media--newspapers, TV and radio--report the news fully, fairly and accurately.

Thirty years ago, only 26 percent felt that way. The gap then between Republicans and Democrats was only 10 percent. Today it is a chasm, with twice as many Republicans mistrustful of the news they are getting.

In the wake of Watergate, the public didn’t blame the messengers for delivering political bad news. In the post-9/11 world, they do and accuse them of distorting it.

Behind this change is the difference in the amount of news we get and how we get it. Before 24/7 cable and the Web, newspaper front pages and the evening news on ABC, CBS and NBC packaged our perception of the world and, for better or worse, there were few other sources of information to challenge what they gave us.

Walter Cronkite signed off every night, saying “That’s the way it is,” and most Americans had no way to doubt it.

Today, there are millions of Walter Cronkites on cable and the Web to decide for themselves the way it is and, although they still depend on MSM for most of the hard news, they decide for themselves what it means.

Mistrust and rancor are part of the price we pay for this privilege, but after the Bush-Cheney era gives way to a likely Democratic Administration, will partisan dissatisfaction with the news shift as well? Or do Republicans have the patent on media-bashing?

Our Most Serious Loss

The figures are by now familiar, a downward spiral of public faith in the President, Congress, the entire Federal government. But the latest Gallup figures show something more ominous--Americans losing trust in themselves.

Politicians come and go, but voters have always been sure they could correct mistakes at the ballot box. But now only 70 percent of Americans trust the public's ability to perform its role in a democratic government, down from 78 percent two years ago and much lower than any other previous Gallup reading.

These figures suggest a growing crisis of confidence that won’t be resolved by a change in the White House. As leading Democratic candidates now waver over promising to have our troops out by 2013 and the President goes cheerfully along his “What? Me Worry?” way, Iraq is beginning to feel like flypaper, keeping us from moving ahead on other national issues such as health care, education, economic uncertainty and social justice.

Before 9/11, we lived in a confident, even cocky, society. How do we get back the trust we lost in ourselves and one another?

The Smart-Stupid Voter Divide

Today the Gallup Poll joins a chorus of gloom-and-doom over Barack Obama’s chances for the Democratic nomination based on his excessive appeal to the college-educated, which historically has resulted in failure.

This is a statistician’s oversimplification of cause and effect.

In rehearsing the history that supports this contention, Gallup cites Michael Dukakis in 1988 as an exception. A closer look at the former Massachusetts Governor who lost to Bush 41 raises other issues.

Dukakis was an earnest man but a terrible politician who answered a question hypothesizing his wife’s rape and murder with an academic analysis of capital punishment and tried to bolster his commander-in-chief credentials by popping out of a tank and ended up looking goofy in an oversized helmet. Moreover, he allowed Karl Rove’s mentor, Lee Atwater, to smear him without responding forcefully.

While he clearly outshone him in what Bush 41 called “the vision thing,” Dukakis lost the election.

What he and those who attract the better-educated but fail at the ballot box represent is the gap between intellectual and emotional appeal. All cheap posturing aside, it goes far beyond smart-stupid into the realm of trust, an issue for all voters. In a campaign, candidates are summoned not for a job interview but a performance that reflects their personal style as well as the substance of their beliefs.

Obama’s failure so far is ironic in that he broke into public consciousness with “rock star” qualities that generate mass appeal but is now allowing himself to be maneuvered into spats designed to make him look naïve.

A New Hampshire admirer had a point the other day chiding him for getting involved with rivals “chewing you up.” Obama got a laugh when he answered, "That's what you do when you run for president."

But it’s no laughing matter for him. What Obama has to do is stop treating the campaign as a classroom test and integrate his confidence, competence and hope into a public persona that projects those qualities for voters on all levels of education.

Voters: "Wake Us When It Starts"

Today’s new Presidential poll numbers evoke a response akin to that of many first-time jurors--wonder at how often a randomly selected group of people can come up with the right, or at least a reasonable, answer.

After all the Gallup deep-thinking about the static results, voters could be saying the equivalent of “Wake me when it’s over” or “when it really starts.”

In an attenuated campaign, that may be as good an answer as any. From week to week, debate to debate, how much new information or insight are they getting about people posturing for their approval? It must mean something that three leading candidates are still undeclared and that an Independent like Mike Bloomberg is waiting in the wings.

Clinton, Giuliani et al have no choice but to keep doing what they have been, but how much long-term damage (or even worse, boredom) will be incurred by all this prolonged scrutiny and nit-picking criticism?

The new results show Obama slipping somewhat but, if he is really following a tortoise-and-hare strategy, that may be as good a response as any to this weird endurance contest.