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July 13, 2005
The Dems' New Hope: More Poll-driven Policy
Andrew Levison at The Emerging Democratic Majority writes on how the Dems should change their approach to the war:
An extremely important new Gallup poll on Iraq (analyzed in a recent post by Ruy Teixeira) dramatically illustrates both the key problem and also the tremendous opportunity that now confronts the Democratic Party. [...]
This poses an extremely difficult opinion climate for the Dems. They face a hard uphill struggle to formulate a clear, coherent message that can appeal to these distinctly ambiguous sentiments among the swing voters while at the same time not alienating those who are firmly opposed to the war. [...] What the Democrats need is one clear core message that firmly expresses most Democrats' basic disagreement with the Bush Administration's approach to Iraq but which is presented in a form and language that seems reasonable and convincing to the ambivalent middle group.
This is just a little conflicted. On one hand, I have no problem with the Dems refining their message into one that "firmly expresses most Democrats' basic disagreement with the Bush administration..." But on the other, the majority of this piece details how the message should be shaped to target a particular voter segment as revealed by the latest polls.
The Republicans have also been urged to refine their message. But in this case what's urged is a more forceful emphasis on the ample empirical evidence that's at hand concerning the Saddam/al Qaeda link. I want my leaders to pick a sound course, then persuade the populace of that course's soundness. Chasing poll results is precisely what got the Dems in trouble in the first place.
Levison continues the somewhat wishful thinking that voters in the center will suddenly see the light and realize Bush really is as bad as Hitler--all the party leadership needs to do is focus, refine, and amplify the message. (That sounds like the same excuses made for all the failed Marxist governments over the years--it was always the implementation, not the source ideas, that was the problem.)
...the key current problems America faces in Iraq stem directly from Bush's profound failures of leadership and [...] public opinion polls clearly indicate that in recent weeks there has been nothing less then a massive collapse in public confidence in George W. Bush as a wartime national leader.
This is just rhetorical boilerplate combined with cherry-picked poll results. Effective leaders do not look to polls for their basis of action. If Levison really wants examples of "profound failures of leadership", he should examine the foreign policies of the Carter and Clinton administrations. Clinton's poll-driven paralysis was in no small way responsible for bin Laden's assumption that the US was a "paper tiger". And did anyone mention Rwanda or Somalia?
Polls are infamously malleable because the questions can be phrased in any number of ways to predetermine the answers. Should the future policy of your party be pinned to capturing a (maybe ephemeral) slice of voters as determined by a poll?
I think the electorate answered that question last November.
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» Quick Shots: Same Ol' Song and Dance from Decision '08
In a typically excellent post, Jeff at the Bernoulli Effect looks at two parties, two calls to refine the party message...and therein discovers why one of the parties is the dominant one come election time... [Read More]
Tracked on July 13, 2005 09:11 PM
