It's All About the Poll

The President's recent woes have pushed two of our obsessions to their ridiculous extremes: sex scandals and polling data. Yet, while we have paid much attention to how the former has drawn our attention away from more substantive issues, we have largely ignored a similar effect caused by the latter.

We seem to have an insatiable appetite for surveys of public opinion. We wake up every morning to new data on how Americans feel about Clinton's moral character, his stewardship of the economy and his artful dodging of the accusations against him.

Certainly polls have been used before, but never to this extent. It has become routine for polls to accompany even the most up-to-date breaking stories. Incredibly, we knew how most Americans felt about the Starr Report and Clinton's testimony before most of us had the chance to weigh the evidence for ourselves.

As fascinating as polls may be, they are quickly turning democracy into a spectator sport. Reporters spend more of their time telling us what the verdicts of the people are rather than how they came to those verdicts. Political pundits increasingly debate what Americans really think, rather than what they should think. News programs are turning the pollsters into pundits by anointing leading information-getters as experts on the mood of the country. CNN has even turned the process of opinion polling into a news worthy event, airing "Talk Back Live," a show in which "ordinary Americans" express their views on hot issues.

We are so infatuated with polls that they have supplanted the issues they were meant to complement as the hottest news stories. When we bombed Afghanistan and Sudan, the media focused on what Americans thought about the bombings without investigating why we thought it. Reporters wanted to know only whether we initially agreed with the air strikes and whether they were too eerily similar to Wag the Dog.

The shift in focus by the media from issues to public opinion about issues is a subtle but important distinction. If we know that an overwhelming majority of Americans concur on an issue as soon as it hits the news, then the public's decision on it seems to be a closed book. In such a situation, it feels almost pointless for us to continue discussing the topic. Furthermore, it is difficult to prevent ourselves from blindly jumping on the bandwagon when an American consensus has already seemingly been formed. The media also seems unwilling to challenge public opinion in such cases, as evidenced when few reporters challenged the legitimacy of the air strikes.

It is unfortunate that we allow one thousand randomly selected Americans to decide the merits of the issues which face us, especially when they make their decisions immediately after the events occur. Our country would have benefited greatly from further debate on the air strikes, for example, especially in light of recent evidence suggesting that the alleged Sudanese chemical weapons plant may have been merely a benign pharmaceutical factory. The moral questions arising from this type of aggressive counter-terrorism response are difficult to answer, and we will probably face them again in the near future. But, since the media portrayed the question simply as whether a majority of Americans would support Clinton's decision, the issue has already been decided and pushed to the back pages of the few publications which still cover it at all.

Of course, our fascination with polls obscures other issues too, including ones closer to home. We watch closely to see how Americans react to proposals for health care and social security reform, yet we care little about the proposals themselves. Few of us knew even the most basic details of Clinton's 1994 health care plan or Republican proposals for reducing the rate of increase of social security payments. All we knew was that most Americans disapproved of those plans, and that seemed to be enough for us.

We can not allow ourselves to be contented in knowing what a cross-section of our compatriots believe. We have to force ourselves to grapple with tough topics, even when the public mood on them appears to be a foregone conclusion. The vitality of our democracy depends on us paying more attention to issues than to what everyone else thinks.

Alex M. Cater '00 is a history and literature concentrator in Dunster House. His column will appear on alternate Mondays.