Yesterday the Gallup Poll website featured a report of a survey conducted on September 14-16, after Dubya's TV address on September 13. The survey showed that nothing that happened last week had changed the shape of public opinion. The public continues to be strongly opposed to Bush's use of U.S. troops to continue indefinitely the military occupation of Iraq.
But the Gallup headline told a different story: "Gen. Petraeus Buys Time for Iraq War, But Not Support." Since buying time was all that Dubya was looking for, anyway, Gallup reported that its poll showed the public had been persuaded to accept Dubya's slow walking for the next nine months.
The headline was simply a fraud! The diary analysis shows that the pollster who drafted the questions intentionally steered respondents to express their approval of the reputation of General Petraeus, rather than their approval of the Bush-Petraeus timetable.
Yesterday the Gallup Poll website featured a report of a survey conducted on September 14-16, Bush's TV address on September 13. The survey showed that nothing that happened last week had changed the shape of public opinion. The poll results show that public continues to be strongly opposed to Bush's use of U.S. troops to continue indefinitely the military occupation of Iraq.
But the Gallup headline told a different story: "Gen. Petraeus Buys Time for Iraq War, But Not Support."
The headline was based on questions designed by the author of this poll to test the public approval of Petraeus and to avoid showing that any plan adopted by President Bush is rejected by a large majority of the American public! The survey questions allowed the poll results to be presented as a tactical political victory for Dubya, since all Dubya wants now is to drag out troop withdrawals to keep a large number in Iraq as of January 20, 2009, when his second term ends.
The idea that Petraeus "bought time" to slow walk the withdrawal of troops from Iraq is based on the distribution of responses to the following questions:
Based on what you have heard or read about this plan, do you think General Petraeus’ plan calls for
-- too few U.S. troops to be withdrawn from Iraq (36%), the right amount (43%), or too many U.S. troops to be withdrawn from Iraq (9%)? No opinion (13%).
Still thinking about this plan, do you think General Petraeus’ plan calls for
-- U.S. troops to be withdrawn too slowly from Iraq (33%), withdrawals to occur at the right pace (42%), or U.S. troops to be withdrawn too quickly from Iraq (12%)? No opinion (13%).
The distribution of the responses is an artifact of questions that were intentionally drafted to seek a result that could be spun to support Bush.
To determine whether respondents truly agree with Bush's "plan," introduced through the Petraeus mouthpiece, the interviewer had to tell the respondent what the number of troops is, and what the timetable is.
The question "Based on what you have heard or read about this plan, do you think General Petraeus' plan...." is designed to test the respondent's approval of the author of the plan, not approval of the terms of the plan.
A question better designed to test public sentiment in the present environment would have been:
Do you think the President's plan to withdraw 30,000 troops from Iraq over the next nine months, leaving in Iraq in July, 2008, the same number of troops as the U.S. had in Iraq at the end of 2006 calls for -- U.S. troops to be withdrawn too slowly from Iraq, withdrawals to occur at the right pace, or U.S. troops to be withdrawn too quickly from Iraq?
The distribution of responses to the question stated in this manner would, IMHO, almost double the percentage of respondents who chose "too slowly," with 60% or more of the poll respondents choosing the anti-Bush option. I acknowledge this is speculation, but it is speculation based on the public's responses to other questions about Iraq when the respondents know that the question relates to Dubya's policies continuing the military occupation of Iraq.
If the pollster wanted to avoid the taint of Presidential sponsorship of the plan in testing public support of the proposed timetable, s/he could use a question omitting reference to the President, starting instead with "Do you think a plan to withdraw...." The question posed might then read:
Do you think a plan or timetable to withdraw 30,000 troops from Iraq over the next nine months, leaving in Iraq in July, 2008, the same number of troops as the U.S. had in Iraq at the end of 2006 calls for -- U.S. troops to be withdrawn too slowly from Iraq, withdrawals to occur at the right pace, or U.S. troops to be withdrawn too quickly from Iraq?
But if the poll were intended to give policymakers accurate information about the public's view of Dubya's timetable, it really makes no sense to ask a question that does not identify the policy as the president's. Identifying the plan with a general can only be intended to confuse the 75% to 90% of respondents who are not news junkies.
If the pollster wanted to test the actual effect on public opinion of Petraeus' claiming authorship of the plan, s/he would first get the respondent's view of the terms of the plan, and then ask a follow-up question, "If I give you the information that General Petraeus claimed authorship of this plan, do you think the plan calls for ...." [OK, a cleaner question would be that Petraeus stated or testified to his authorship, but limiting the information to Petraeus' claims, without reference to all the Bush-Petraeus interactions leading up to last week, would be really misleading, too.]
The Gallup organization does not hire stupid people to draft its survey questions. So whenever we see a question drafted to avoid attributing a policy to its actual (unpopular) author - President Bush -- we can be certain that the polling organization has made a conscious choice to slant the survey results in favor of the unpopular policymaker. Gallup has always had a tinge of Republican bias, and it sure shows up here.
The headline on Gallup's report of this poll is a partisan pitch, based on questions that did not truly test public opinion about the timetable that President Bush announced last Thursday night. These questions are the worst type of subterfuge, because most lay members of the public do not know enough about opinion polling to see the partisan slant that Gallup has inserted into its questions and into the report of this survey.