Trust the NY Times to make a hash of one of its own polls if that's what it takes to ratify the conventional wisdom. In this case, the conventional wisdom is that the Dems lose to Bush on national security--but read past the headline, because the Times reporters have to do a few interesting flips to keep the storyline together ...
(This has been posted on my Salon blog, Reading A1,
but the blog's new and I thought this might be of interest to some KOSsacks.)All the self-created non-news that's fit to bury. The self-commissioned, self-reported opinion poll didn't attain its place as one of the high ritual expressions of corporate journalism because of its tendency to produce uncomfortable thought. Certainly the
Times\/CBS Presidential approval poll
reported today by Robin Toner and Janet Elder can't be understood as news in the ordinary sense. As a liturgical occasion, the big national poll ratifies the organization's own reach and power, while as an instrument of scientific objectivity (so-called) it simultaneously establishes and enforces "democratic" consensus.
Pretty much the entire story is in the headline: Poll Bolsters Bush on Terrorism but Finds Doubts on Economy. The poll, as reported, offers such an uncontroversial restatement of the current conventional wisdom that it hardly seems worth reading past the headling—which is a good part of the point of the whole exercise. But persist past the jump to A18, because there's a real dilly of a pickle in there.
Here's the introduction to the interior half of the story:
While the Times poll was a road map for an intensely divided electorate, it also highlighted Mr. Bush's strengths.
There follows a recitation of said highlighted Bush strengths (which could just as fairly have been stated so as to highlight the reciprocal weaknesses, but "Bush strength" is too compelling a meme to be foregone), and then two paragraphs follow of deft avoidance of the issue:
For all of Mr. Bush's strengths, the poll shows the potential for a competitive election. When aasked whether Mr. Bush had done more to unite the country or divide it, the public was split—48 percent said he had brought Americans together, 44 percent said he had divided them.
When given a choice between an unnamed Democrat and Mr. Bush, 43 percent of the registered voters polled said they would vote for Mr. Bush, while 45 percent said they would vote for the Democrat.
Did you get that? Generic Democrat beats Bush among registered voters! To be fair, that's not especially news either, since Generic Democrat has been doing that in at least some polls for a while now, but don't you think that a programatically "liberal" paper might have gone with that as a lead? Especially when the same paper's poll shows (though unnoticed by the writers) that Bush II presides over a historically polarized electorate: fully 95% of respondents have an approve/disapprove opinion (next highest being Reagan's 90% in 1984), with only 5 points between approval and disapproval and disapproval at an historically high level (5 points higher than Clinton's in 1996, 6 points higher than Daddy's in 1992) for this point in the election cycle. In this environment, where Bush has extraordinarily little room to improve his numbers and his opponents are still largely unknown to the mass of people, and after several weeks of "policy" announcements intended to up Bush's positives (he's a visionary now, you know): well, the fact that he's behind (though within the poll's MoE) to a generic Democrat seems to me a pretty bloody significant observation.
No, to Toner and Elder, a poll that has Bush on the short end merely and mildly "shows the potential for a competitive election." (You know, the way a 14-7 halftime score shows the potential for the team in the lead to be competitive in the second half.)
Much better for Toner and Elder to affirm the operative line, that Bush's big lead in the national security area sets "a high bar" for the Democrats, none of whom has emerged yet as a credible commander-in-chief. (Helpfully, it's on this point that the story quotes its only expert, a Republican pollster, to allow as how "people wonder whether the Democrats will be as aggressive as Bush in keeping the country safe.") Because, see, when it comes to "the campaign against terrorism" Bush wins: 68% approval, only 28% disapproval.
Here's a suggestion to the pollsters: maybe Bush wins that question because none of your respondents knows what the fuck the "campaign against terrorism" actually is! The next question, on the Iraq fiasco, generates 48-46 ambivalence, and you're not asking anybody about Afghanistan, or Al Qaeda, or about airport or coastal security, or about anything else solid. "Campaign against terrorism" is a pure marketing term; all you're doing with that question is determining whether people associate the brand with Bush. Of course they do—it's his damn brand. And in the absence of anything in the poll to relate approval/disapproval on different policy areas to likely vote, well, the CW that makes "war on terror" Bush's winning card is speculative at best. Not that you'd know that from Toner and Elder.
