I’m not sure when polls started getting a bad wrap, but to hear Bush tell it, they’re political poison.
Boasting of his disinterest in polling seems to be one of Bush’s favorite things to say. At his press conference this week, he said:
[A]s to whether or not I made decisions based upon polls, I don’t. I just don’t make decisions that way.
He liked it the line so much, he repeated it later on in response to a different question.
And, Don, you know, if I tried to fine-tune my messages based upon polls, I think I’d be pretty ineffective. I know I would be disappointed in myself.
As rhetoric goes, this sounds pretty good. Bush is saying his White House is driven by conviction. The president will do what is right, we’re told, whether it’s popular or not.
Of course, none of this is even remotely true. Slate’s William Saletan noted a New York Times article yesterday, which included this nugget:
“It was no accident that President Bush passed up five chances on Tuesday night to offer regrets, contrition or an acknowledgement that he might have made mistakes in handling the Sept. 11 attacks or the war in Iraq. … One adviser said the White House had examined polling and focus group studies in determining that it would be a mistake for Mr. Bush to appear to yield.” (emphasis added)
Joshua Green wrote the seminal article on the subject two years ago for the Washington Monthly. As Green explained, “Bush doesn’t believe in polling — just ask his pollsters.”
[T]he Bush administration is a frequent consumer of polls, though it takes extraordinary measures to appear that it isn’t. This administration, unlike Clinton’s, rarely uses poll results to ply reporters or congressional leaders for support. “It’s rare to even hear talk of it unless you give a Bush guy a couple of drinks,” says one White House reporter. But Republican National Committee filings show that Bush actually uses polls much more than he lets on, in ways both similar and dissimilar to Clinton.
It’s a fun read to look back on, two years later.