The poll apparently didn’t conform to their optimistic scenarios

March 7, 2006

In January, top administration officials — including the president, Condi Rice, and others — remained optimistic that Hamas would not do well in Palestinian elections. When Hamas, which is considered a terrorist organization by the State Department, won a landslide victory, the administration seemed confused and surprised. Rice said that she had directed State Department officials to determine “why nobody saw it coming … because it does say something about perhaps not having had a good enough pulse on the Palestinian population.”

Of course, lots of people saw it coming. For example, there was Rice’s State Department.

A State Department-commissioned poll taken days before January’s Palestinian elections warned U.S. policymakers that the militant Islamic group Hamas was in a position to win.

Nevertheless, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said after the election that they had no advance indication of a major Hamas triumph.

The poll found that Hamas had been gaining support in previous months and was running neck-and-neck with the secular Fatah party – 30 percent vs. 32 percent – among likely voters. It was distributed within the State Department on Jan. 19, six days before the elections.

The poll found that corruption in the Palestinian Authority was the leading issue among Palestinians, and that 52 percent believed that Hamas was more qualified to clean it up, compared with 35 percent who put their faith in Fatah, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas’ moderate faction.

Something about this seems familiar. Top administration officials received word about events in the Middle East, but the discouraging information was ignored when it conflicted with the administration’s optimistic scenarios. Where have I heard that before?

The Administration is simply incapable of listening to any type of warning about any situation.

Of course, so are all of the people who voted for them.

  • “Where have I heard that before?” – CB

    Would that be the crack about no one imagining people flying planes into buildings despite:

    1) An attempt to do just that to a nuclear power plant

    2) A plot to do just that with planes from the Phillipines

    3) A Tom Clancy novel (Debt of Honor) about just that happening (and Jack Ryan becomes president)

    Apparently, Condi is none too imaginative. Or is it just none too attentive?

  • Rice on Hamas: “Nobody saw it coming”

    Bush on Katrina: “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees”

    These people are idiots.

  • I can only hope that they are lying through their teeth every time that they say, “nobody predicted…” The alternative, that they really are so f*&king clueless, is just so much worse.

  • Eerily familiar.

    Bin Laden to Attack?
    Airplanes into buildings?
    Greeted as liberators?
    Quagmire?
    Darn near everything related to Iraq?
    Levees being topped/breeched?
    Not enough people/supplies to handle a domestic disaster?

    I’m with doubtful, though. The American public knew of these horrible shortcomings before the 2004 election. Yes 60 million voted for these incompetent fools. I don’t blame the Sadministration. I blame the enablers, those who voted to return these morons to office in spite of all the evidence that that would be a tragic mistake. They are the ones I hold in contempt.

  • Re; George talking about the white house rug, that Laura designed it and it says “optimism”.

    It all comes back to that damn optimistic talking rug in the oval office that fills George and his followers with crap during the daily briefings . Laura needs to either get a more realistic talking rug to advise the president or go with hardwood floors.

  • OK I am not a middle east specialist but even I wasn’t surprised that Hamas did well. There must be some real communications issues between professional State employees who live in the real world and political appointees who live in an alternate reality of their own making.

  • It’s that damn optimistic rug that Laura designed for the Oval Office. Bush has been hyp-motized!

  • I have to go along with Castor Troy that they are lying. They KNEW it was coming. They knew and they did nothing about it, because that’s what they wanted to have happen. They want Hamas in power so that we will get the kind of conflict predicted in Revelations. If Hamas is in power, then they have their Terrorist-sponsored state that they can wage war on for years and years. This misguided administration WANTS an all out world war pitting Islam against Christianity…one that will guarantee once and for all the return of Jesus. And barring that, it will at least decide who will control the oil.

    I hope Jesus welcomes us as liberators. The State Department is pretty confident that he will.

  • I hate to say it, folks, but they ARE frakkin’ clueless. I plow on through “Assassins at the Gate,” and Packer chronicles event after event after event where these morons had the information to get it right and wouldn’t believe it because it didn’t fit what they “knew” the real truth was. And every time, they screwed the pooch and made things worse. EVERY FRAKKIN’ TIME!

    As to Condoleeza Rice, it now strikes me that her career can be seen as one long upward move accomplished by telling those above her what they wanted to hear, thus becoming “the smart nigra” in Ol’Massa’s eyes – hey, it’s been a trick black people have used with Ol’ Massa since they had to start dealing with Ol’ Massa. So when it came time to give out a promotion, Ol’ Massa would give it to the “smart one” who told them what they wanted to hear. The unfortunate thing about being a “Yes person” is that, eventually, you rise to a position where the real requirement of the job are to give Ol’ Massa the truth, which often is not the same thing as “what he wants to hear.” And when you don’t, and Ol’ Massa gets in trouble, it’s not his head that rolls away from the chopping block like a deflated soccer ball.

  • Oh, come on, give them a break. They were probably all out at a dinner-party, like pre-Katrina. “What’s that, you say? Please, come back and bother us with this after the wine.”

    That or Condi was out shoe-shopping again. So many shoes, so little time!

  • I’m curious why it is that nobody in the press spells it HAMAS. The word is an acronym of Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyyah (“Islamic Resistance Movement”). We don’t refer to our nation as Usa, the confederacy as Csa, Oas, Icbm, Nato, Nasa, Ussr, Unesco, Unctad, Scotus, Potus, etc. Why Hamas?

    But then we don’t refer to FATAH either (a reverse acronym of Harakat al-Tahrir al-Watani al-Filastini – literally: “Palestinian National Liberation Movement”), so I guess it’s consistent with our other references to Arab unions? No, it isn’t: there’s PLO, UAR, UAE.

    Maybe it’s a way of minimizing the importance of FATAH and HAMAS. Or maybe it’s just ignorance. A puzzle.

  • As a say now all the time…it’s the Tinkerbell Presidency. You gotta clap your hands, and bah-leeve! children…or else Tinkerbell will wither and die.

    What a sorry state of affairs, when they get away with promoting themselves as “hard line-realists” and get away with pretending the pragmatic democrats (who often ARE able to see their ideals don’t always match reality, and adjust) are some “touchy-feely, flakes”….

    It’s the old switcheroo, which Rove is great at, attack thine enemies on the things you yourself are lacking in.

  • So it was a good thing when the IRA got into politics in Northern Ireland before giving up their guns, but it’s a bad thing when HAMAS does it? Sounds like racism to me.

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