Polls: Boon or Bane?
In a Fox News report on its internet version, dated July 15, 2011, President Obama is quoted as follows, “You have 80 percent of the American people who support a balanced approach. Eighty percent of the American people support an approach that includes revenues and includes cuts. So the notion that somehow the American people aren’t sold is not the problem.” He continues, “The problem is members of Congress are dug in ideologically into various positions because they boxed themselves in with previous statements."
This leads the listener or reader to consider the veracity of the statements taken separately. Pollsters can and do ask convoluted questions, politicians not considered the most truthful people in the land, tend to twist a convoluted question even more until it looks and sounds like a strand of DNA.
Backbench Media – http://www.backbenchmedia.com/ranking-political-polls/ – in an article written by Jim on September 19, 2010, provides, "Here is a ranking of the accuracy of a couple of hundred of the most common political polling organizations. This list might be helpful to you if you see different tracking polls which ask the same questions but have different results.”
Thus the title of my article, Polls: Boon or Bane?
Obama, as expected will cite those figures supporting his side of any argument and will give them a little tweak to make then appear even better. It is not the facts that are in question; it is the people using them. In the case cited in the first sentence, Obama chooses the most appealing figures to bolster his argument. On closer examination, he has twisted some meaningful figures into a bold lie. There is no facet of his activities able to garner 80 % support. Maybe on January 21, 2009 that would have been possible, not today.
American are prone to always take the leading and most dramatic sentence in a pollsters report and repeat it as gospel. That is a grievous mistake. Even well-constructed poll questions can be corrupted by the disingenuous. As Benjamin Disraeli, British Prime Minister, 1874-1880 remarked, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Benjamin_Disraeli Here is another our public servants ought to heed. “I repeat…that all power is a trust; that we are accountable for its exercise; that from the people, and for the people all springs, and all must exist.” The site is a great read.
Mr. Obama obviously follows the (favorable) polls very closely, vain, conceited and narcissistic. He would be well advised to take note of the unfavorable polls, his popularity, I.e. sycophantic following, has taken a tumble since 2009.
He can interpret the polls in any manner he chooses, even to his chagrin, but one thing is a certainty. The majority of American people want freedom, freedom from government, from intrusive regulations, from threats, from predictions of dire consequences, from lies and distortions of the truth. We are durable and flexible and tensile enough to handle and calamity, Government created or natural phenomena.
Something’s gotta give, something will give and it will not be America; it will be her servants, all 545 of them. The polls tell me that as I read between the lines and the conclusions.
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