Bush and Polls

In advance of Bush's State of the Union, this cautionary from John Cole strikes me as important:

Can I ask you commenters a favor? Quit citing poll after poll after poll of Bush’s approval ratings. They suck. They are historically low. I will concede they are probably going to stay that way, barring a miracle. So until they change dramatically, quit citing them.

Why? Because they DO NOT MATTER. This administration CLEARLY does not give two hoots in hell about poll numbers. They have both houses of Congress (and, barring a total disaster, will retain them in 2006), they have the White House, they just rammed through two very conservative Supreme Court Justices, they are filling the State Department and the CIA and every agency with young conservative political appointees, and they are simply having their way with the government and the country.

Bush and Cheney and Rove do not care about the poll numbers. If they did, they would change their behavior and do all sorts of popular little things like the famous Dick Morris triangulation schemes (school uniforms, etc.). But they aren’t, and they won’t.

That's wrong, save in myth. The President's poll numbers will likely decide the 2006 election. Karl Rove and Dick Cheney and George Bush surely do care about retaining Congress, if for no other reason then the rash of investigations that would result from Speaker Pelosi would end the Bush Presidency as a policy-making institution. And while there's little doubt that the triumvirate at 1600 Pennsylvania don't see low poll numbers as a constraint on action, they do see it as a constraint on conservative action. Their rhetoric tonight will be a perfect reflection of high polling priorities, led by the highest polling domestic worry of all: health costs.

A couple years back, Josh Green wrote an excellent article on this very subject. As he put it, the president doesn't believe in polling -- just ask his pollsters:

Republican National Committee filings show that Bush actually uses polls much more than he lets on, in ways both similar and dissimilar to Clinton. Like Clinton, Bush is most inclined to use polls when he's struggling. It's no coincidence that the administration did its heaviest polling last summer, after the poorly received rollout of its energy plan, and amid much talk of the "smallness" of the presidency. A Washington Monthly analysis of Republican National Committee disbursement filings revealed that Bush's principal pollsters received $346,000 in direct payments in 2001. Add to that the multiple boutique polling firms the administration regularly employs for specialized and targeted polls and the figure is closer to $1 million. That's about half the amount Clinton spent during his first year; but while Clinton used polling to craft popular policies, Bush uses polling to spin unpopular ones---arguably a much more cynical undertaking.

That last is a particularly important point. Polling gets a bad rap, but in theory, it's a Democratic godsend. In a country with 300 million people, some sort affordable method of gathering popular priorities and preferences is exactly what the polity needs to continue functioning. A town hall here or there excludes the busy, the immobile, or the civically apathetic, the mailbag excludes most everyone. Polling, in theory, can take public temperature at low cost, enabling politicians to quickly hear and address the concerns of their constituents.

But polling, in its more cynical, routinized form, does quite the opposite. It seeks to convince that the politician's priorities are, in fact, their desires. Tonight, George W. Bush will announce his renewed support for Health Savings Accounts. His support, notably its phrasing and emphasis, will have been heavily polled. But none of those polls will have returned a public cry for more out of pocket spending, or disgust with their overly-comprehensive insurance. That's because the policy preceded the poll, and all the focus groups and surveys simply sought to pin down the most benign, inoffensive way of evading the reality of HSA's.

Bush cares about polls. Don't believe for a minute that he doesn't. But he doesn't care about what polls say about voters, only what they say about him. He cares about his own popularity because that decides his efficacy, and he uses polls to convince American's that business priorities, which are Bush's priorities, aren't actually as bad as they sound at first blush. He's very, very good at it. So good, in fact, that smart guys like John don't believe he does it.