Bad News for Pollsters
SCHORR, DANIEL
Washington Notebook Bad News for Pollsters BY DANIEL SCHORR More and more Americans are refusing to respond to opinion pollsters. This is threatening an important industry, and that is serious...
...The most dramatic example of pollster failure I can remember occurred in 1936...
...Real action is taken by a Federal agency only when it is politically necessary "to quiet things down...
...Had Bush waited longer, though, he would have appeared to be acting only in response to Clinton...
...while not ready to bow out, says: "We have bankrupted America and given our children a legacy of bankruptcy...
...On Capitol Hill, all foreign aid was perceived to be unpopular...
...Officials courted disaster for America with tunnel-vision attempts to befriend Iraq, the enemy of our designated enemy, Iran, and to make nice to Saudi Arabia, which helps keep oil prices down...
...Courting Disaster Like the Dead Sea Scrolls, the secret files on pre-Kuwait policy making in the Reagan and Bush administrations are being unearthed and deciphered in an effort to comprehend the incomprehensible...
...Urgent memos were written to Secretary James D. Watkins recommending that he ask the National Security Council for tighter controls on exporting the critical components and machine tools...
...He or she described a "risk-averse, in-box" mentality, somnolent agencies displaying posters exhorting "Total Quality," the sabotaging of statutory mandates, and the sense that nothing is to be accomplished "except the creation of good feelings and the illusion of action...
...Thus did Baker indirectly suggest the extraordinary internal conflict that had delayed the Administration's decision for so long...
...Still, it should be remembered that dismantling the government has long struck voters as a good idea...
...So, one eye on Yeltsin, one eye on Clinton...
...The record of television network exit polls?interviewing voters in carefully selected localities after they have voted—has been even better...
...In April 1989 the Department of Energy office that monitors the spread of nuclear arms spotted a pattern of clandestine Iraqi purchases of specialized equipment, some of it American, that pointed to a major effort to develop an atomic weapon...
...In December, Secretary Baker flew to Moscow to meet with President Yeltsin...
...Its four months of vacillation provide a textbook case of the interplay between policy and politics...
...At precisely that moment President Bush announced his aid scheme...
...In some ways it has been too good, permitting anchors to report the outcome of a general election before all the people in the West have cast their ballots...
...The Gallup Organization, once able to get the cooperation of 80 per cent of those it contacted, says that recently the percentage has been closer to 60...
...True, but Yeltsin would have been as well served by an announcement any day before the seventh...
...No doubt some suspect a selling scam...
...Baker then began floating the idea that a broad aid package, including a ruble stabilization fund, was in the works...
...Since the end of the Gulf War the extent of the Iraqi nuclear program has astonished United Nations inspection teams...
...And you wonder why voters sputter at pollsters...
...Baker asked for final action by June, when Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin is scheduled to arrive in Washington for his first formal summit meeting...
...The White House stayed generally mum, except for hinting that no action would be taken until after the election...
...Baker indicated that the Bush Administration was moving in the direction of supporting a comprehensive aid package...
...From that bitter experience later polling outfits learned to use the telephone less and interviews more, as well as to construct their samples more scientifically...
...It is frightening to think how close the world came to being subject to nuclear blackmail, or worse, at the hands of Saddam Hussein because American officialdom blindly pursued its lunatic tilts toward supposed friends or supposed enemies of our supposed enemies...
...Its final election-eve prediction was 370 electoral votes for Landon, 161 for Roosevelt...
...Others probably are just too busy...
...Unlike the past, in 1936 the electorate tended to divide by class and income...
...He told Baker that Russia was fully committed to taking the plunge into a free economy, but desperately needed outside help to tide it over...
...All through the campaign it showed Republican Alf Landon of Kansas ahead of incumbent Franklin D. Roosevelt...
...The Administration explained that the timing was dictated by the fact that Yeltsin had to face Russia's Congress of People's Deputies starting on April 7 and needed ammunition to beat off a conservative attack on his reform plans...
...The Politics of Policy Making "A once in a century opportunity," Secretary of State James A. Baker III intoned as he presented to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in early April, a bill felicitously titled, "The Freedom Support Act...
...The respected Warren Rud-man(R.-N.H...
...Saudi Arabia's furnishing 2,000-pound bombs to Iraq paled by comparison with what the New York Times dug up...
...And surely many back away for the same reason they don't vote in the primaries?because they are confused, angry, turned off by the whole political process...
...And Presidential candidate Bill Clinton, primed by Russian-aid enthusiasts in the Congressional Democratic leadership, scheduled a major foreign policy statement for 11 a.m...
...was widely interpreted as a signal that Americans wanted more attention paid to domestic problems...
...When asked why, as if to add insult to injury, 54 per cent would not answer that question...
...We have defrauded the country to get ourselves elected...
...That position suddenly changed a year and a half later when President Bush, preparing for war against Iraq, announced on Thanksgiving Day to the troops in Saudi Arabia that an Iraqi atomic bomb was much more imminent than had been realized...
...approval...
...Presidents Carter, Reagan and Bush all ran on a platform of contempt for government...
...The Secretary recalled that two months earlier he had been told Congress would not act on a rescue package until the President weighed in...
...A Republican who has served for 10 years in the Reagan and Bush administrations at a sub-Cabinet level wrote anonymously in the New York Times of a Federal structure that is a sham, "led by a Recreation President...
...This is threatening an important industry, and that is serious business...
...Early in February, however, when Yeltsin visited Camp David and gave President Bush a convincing presentation of his economic reform plans, he was disappointed at Bush's unforthcoming response...
...We saw the pollsters go wrong in Britain, saying that the Tories would not win a majority...
...Ambassador Robert S. Strauss returned from Moscow with dire warnings of disaster ahead in Russia if aid was not made available soon...
...In actuality, FDR won 523 electoral votes to Landon's 8. The Digest's mistake was polling by telephone...
...The Walker Research Organization in Indianapolis reports that 36 per cent of those contacted simply refused to answer questions...
...It is speculated that Buchanan voters, being angry, were more anxious to demonstrate it than Bush voters...
...Buchanan became a diminishing factor...
...The first signs of paralysis appeared last November, when the upset victory of Senator Harris Wofford (D.-Pa...
...on April 1 in New York City...
...The blunder was the end of the Digest poll and, indeed, of the Digest...
...One find in the secret archives by Los Angeles Times archaeologists told how, in 1986, Saudi Arabia was able to transfer American-made bombs to Iraq...
...For the $3 billion a year opinion survey business, these latter-day refusniks are becoming a big problem...
...share in a $24 billion in-ternational effort to help Russia and the other former Soviet republics make their perilous passage to democracy and a free market...
...those without telephones voted disproportionately for Roosevelt...
...The official U.S...
...The message was reinforced, from the Right, by Buchanan's "America First" campaign in the primaries...
...If things go on this way, it may become necessary to fire the electorate and start all over again...
...So, now," he said, "the President has weighed in, publicly and unequivocally...
...Their general record has been good...
...Nevertheless, the Administration did put itself solidly in Yeltsin's corner, signaling that any reneging on his reforms would jeopardize the whole aid program, and that played an important part in helping the Russian President maintain his position...
...The previously highly reliable poll of the Literary Digest came a cropper...
...At the end of March a series of things happened...
...Perhaps, but also without the uproar attending the uncorroborated allegation that Israel had transferred American Patriot missile technology to China and South Africa...
...The State Department now says this was done without U.S...
...Checks and Balances The government, meanwhile, is acting shell-shocked...
...position remained that Iraq bore watching, but was many years away from an atomic bomb capability...
...The memos were dismissed as alarmist by department superiors aware of the Administration's policy of tilting toward Iraq...
...If the House is in a state of wild confusion, the Senate is in a state of wild confession...
...If government turns out to be contemptible, we shouldn't be surprised...
...This would au-thorize the U.S...
...The point is, if you miss a significant number of people in your sample and you are not sure why, you can blow the game...
...The equally respected John C. Danforth (R.-Mo...
...The situation does not seem much better on the Executive side...
...Richard M. Nixon circulated a memorandum warning that Bush was missing the boat...
...But now comes the latest monkey-wrench thrown into the delicate polling machinery—a declining response rate...
...bowing out amid much general wailing, says the legislators have lied about the deficit and what it will take to fix it (namely, limiting entitlement programs...
...The House banking scandal, which has given a whole new meaning to "checks and balances," has stimulated a growing wave of retirements among members fearful of facing the voters...
...That night in Montreal Yeltsin grumbled about unnamed leaders who "talk and talk" yet do not act...
...We saw their American counterparts go wrong in underestimating the strength of Patrick J. Buchanan against President George Bush in New Hampshire...
...The Iraqi drive to become a nuclear power was played down and then played up to suit changing policy needs...
Vol. 75 • May 1992 • No. 6
