Posted on 10/17/2004 5:06:40 PM PDT by mylife
OCT 18, 2004 Interview With Pollster John Zogby Next US chief has to heal the meanness
By Pranay Gupte
IN MR John Zogby's mind, there's little question that the electorate in the United States is divided into what he calls 'two warring nations' - one favouring President George W. Bush in the upcoming Nov 2 presidential election, the other siding with his Democratic challenger, Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts.
The increasingly sharpening divisions are over ideology - conservative versus liberal - and over the very core values of the American system, which has long prided itself on tolerance and magnanimity.
'Each side feels that if the other wins, it would be the end of the Republic,' Mr Zogby told The Straits Times during an overnight visit to Singapore sponsored by Reuters.
'Whoever the next president is, he is going to have to be, first and foremost, a healer - or at least someone who stops this widening, this deepening of ideological divisions in the US. The ugly thing is, this meanness has spilled over from the halls of Congress to Main Street, US.'
What Mr Zogby thinks of the American Republic's predicament matters - not just because he is widely considered to be one of the country's most accurate pollsters, but also because he has studied and taught history and the culture of societies.
It's not so much the arithmetic behind the statistics in polls but the sociology of respondents that matters, he said. That means it's the personal environment of the respondent that ultimately determines his or her political choices.
'Societies need to have sustained civility in their political discourse,' he said. 'Remember the election of 1800?'
His interviewer did not.
'Well, let me tell you,' the bespectacled Mr Zogby said. 'It was a bitter election, and Thomas Jefferson was finally declared the winner. His first exhortation to Congress was 'We're all Federalists, we're all Republicans, so let us proceed to bond, to heal our wounds'.'
That is Mr Zogby's way of saying that President Bush has been 'the most divisive president in modern American history'.
'Republicans and Democrats aren't talking to each other across the aisle,' he said. 'In Congress, they used to swim together, play tennis and racquetball, and they used to party together. Now they don't even know one another's names. The civility has gone.'
It has gone, in his view, because President Bush deliberately chose to ignore the 'creative centre' that traditionally energised American politics.
From the very start of his term in January 2001, Mr Bush resolved that he would go as far right as the political structure would tolerate. Unfortunately, the very tolerance that has signified magnanimity permitted Mr Bush to take his policies to unprecedented locations rightward.
'The danger of ignoring the 'creative centre' is that you then cannot appeal to both sides in the political and sociological game,' Mr Zogby said. 'That's why the next president has to be like Thomas Jefferson. The American political system simply cannot take any more of this push to the right.'
Mr Zogby - he's clearly flattered when he's called Professor Zogby - belongs to an industry that, as elections and public-opinion sampling go, is relatively young.
In their 1988 book, Polls and Surveys: Understanding What They Tell Us, Professors Norman M. Bradburn and Seymour Sudman say that the presidential election of 1936 brought the new 'science' of polling to prominence when three independent polls (by Crossley, Gallup, and Elmo Roper) predicted Franklin D. Roosevelt's victory over Alf Landon.
They point out that these polls stood in stark contrast to the prediction of the Literary Digest that Roosevelt would receive only 40.9 per cent of the vote. As in its widely publicised reports about public opinion over the preceding decade, the Digest rested its 1936 prediction on a tally of ballots returned from millions that had been mailed out across the country.
That Crossley, Gallup, and Roper had the audacity to base predictions on relatively small samples (compared to the two million ballots on which the Digest based its claim) was itself newsworthy, according to Prof Bradburn and Prof Sudman.
'But when their projections were borne out by the election returns, the validity of modern polling had been established. The point had been made that the way a sample is drawn is more important than its size. Bias towards the affluent inherent in the lists from which the Digest had drawn names - telephone subscribers and owners of automobiles - could not be offset by large numbers,' they say.
They also point out that in 1848, Belgian mathematician Adolphe Quetelet advanced the idea of the 'average man' by arguing that the concept of the normal distribution of observations around a mean could be applied to analysis of society as well as to the physical world.
Polling has come a long way since then. Globally, it's now a US$4 billion (S$6.77 billion) industry annually. It employs nearly 100,000 people and has five distinct sectors - academic/non-profit; private; mass media sector; government; and in-house.
In 1939, the firm of Rensis Likert developed polling for the US Department of Agriculture, the first such operation within an agency of government. Polls by Hadley Cantril provided then-president Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, with valuable information on American public opinion throughout World War II.
The Office of Public Opinion Research he established in 1940 at Princeton University conducted research into the methodology of polling and became a central archive for polling data. In 1941, the National Opinion Research Centre, now at the University of Chicago, was established.
In short, everyone polls nowadays - corporations conduct polls in order to determine how to launch new brands or reinvigorate old ones; politicians poll in order to focus their campaigning funds on specific regions and communities; companies even poll their own employees to assess corporate morale and productivity; media organisations poll readers to determine their reading habits - and often adjust their coverage accordingly.
All this means that Mr Zogby is a pretty busy man - and certainly a wealthy one. His 20-year-old firm, Zogby International, based in Utica, New York, conducts polls in several dozen countries.
Of Arab descent, Mr Zogby is especially interested in Middle East issues, and is currently undertaking a series of polls in Iraq about issues such as the viability of establishing a genuinely democratic state there.
But isn't polling still a somewhat uncertain science after all these years? There's little question that after the 2000 presidential election in the US - when the key state of Florida was first awarded to Democrat Al Gore, then to his Republican challenger Mr Bush - polling took a huge black eye.
It suffered a solid blow to the solar plexus this May when virtually every major poll in India predicted that the ruling United Democratic Alliance led by the right-wing Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party would easily be re-elected.
And, of course, there's the mother of all polling disasters: In 1948 almost every American pollster predicted that Harry S. Truman would be defeated by Governor Thomas E. Dewey; Truman won by almost five percentage points.
'Polling can be uncertain only if you rely on statistics alone,' is Mr Zogby's riposte. 'That's why an effective pollster has to rely on culture, history and sociology. I repeat, polling is the study of human behaviour, not simply a sampling of people's preferences.'
That may well explain his success. His big test will come on Nov 2. In Singapore last Friday, he flatly predicted that Mr Kerry would become the 44th President of the United States.
And what if he's wrong?
Mr Zogby looked at his questioner with some irritation. But it could have been the fatigue on his face after a 24-hour flight from New York.
"Heal the Meanness" = Destruction of Terrorists + Liberal Democrap Traitors
This is the formula for tranquility.
Okay. . .true. . .all true. . .
But the meaness realllllly started at the Demrat Convention/Chicago l968. . .the beginning of the radical Left's takeover of the Democrat Party.
I report. You decide. L0L
All the more reason not to trust a thing he says or his polls.
When things are going well for Democrats, the activists are calmer and the media make a pretense of being objective, and no one talks about what a divided country this is. When things are going well for Democrats, the Republicans just pursue their interests quietly because they have never had the media to help push their agenda.
Now things are not going so well for Democrats. Democrat activists are angrier and more outrageous than ever and the MSM is now pulling out all the stops to help them, and that creates turmoil and divisiveness. Evan Thomas said the MSM is behind Kerry and it's worth 15 poll points to Kerry. Without the all-out push this year by the MSM, we would not be nearly as divided as we seem to be now.
I hate dimbulb Dems. Not because I don't agree with them. I hate them because they lie. I hate them because I voted for them at one time, but never again. My hate of them started in political chats. I am a war hawk have been since I was 15 and our Embassy in Libia was taken and they held our people for 444 days. It was in political chats I learned of the depth of their depravity. They would boldly lie and invite you to check out the lie. What they did not count on was my tendency to cross reference. I never trust just one source for important information. So with quite a bit of cross referencing I found Dems just out and out lie and it is most of the time. I will now and forever only vote for either the Republican candiate or the Libertarian or other 3rd party candidate.
Excuse me? I hope that was directed to Zogby. I'm just the messenger here.
Exactly. Yet, you'll never hear a Democrat admit they're wholly responsible for the polarization of this country. I have no idea what he means by "heal the meaness". If telling the truth is being mean-spirited, I'd rather be mean-spirited in the eyes of a Liberal. If there is anyone that is truly mean, it's the Democrats and their willing accomplices in the MSM. They've been seething in their own pent up rage for nearly 2 years, blaming everyone but themselves.
That would be Jimmy Carter's Iran appeasement policy.
No party is meaner than the democrats.
They're the school yard bully.
And worse.
We have the IRS because of democrats.
We do not drill in Alaska because of democrats.
Mama T's Miracle Elixir:
Take 9 raisins.
Soak them in a fifth of gin for two weeks.
Take the raisins out.
Squeeze the gin back into the bottle.
Drink the gin.
Throw raisins away.
Note: Recipe can be used to cure any ailment.
Wish I had a dollar, for how many times that claim has been made; in the last month alone; where Demrat spokesperson meets Repub. . .and in 'Bush vs Kerry'. . .and NO ONE; not one Repub, corrected the history; including President Bush when Kerry tossed that one to him in debate.
Worse Kerry helped himself to some credit in that task of 'budget balancing' as well. . .(of course, work for Kerry is just showing up and signing a Bill). He has to get off his bycycle to do it, unfortunately.
Gasoline prices are over $2.00 a gallon today because of the Democrats. Several years ago, I heard an enviro-nazi say "Gas should be over $5.00 so the people will realize the dream of alternative sources of fuel".
Mean spirited people at CBS, NBC,ABC and CNN will never put up with another Bush term. They ignore George Soros financing the Kerry campaign? They ignore the Kerry's and Edwards attending the moveon.org fundraiser in New York with filthy Whoopy Goldberg slurring insults at President Bush. They ignore the campaign finance suport of Soros and his millions so he could meddle in the election. The media is blind and biased and they are selling our kids right down the drain. Kerry Fonda Communist support is far from over. Kerry is exactly what we all saw decades ago. A weasel scumbag with no loyalty to America.
Vote them to oblivion, keep few in the glass jars for show and there will be no meaness, there... healed!
Whadda you expect from bunch of 60ies hippies who never grew up and managed to lie their way into the government. No shame, no manneres, no decency, bunch of power hungry lying skunks!
I'm with you.
I had hoped POTUS would state same during the debates.
Clinton always took credit for balancing the budget,
but recall that democrats continue to blame Reagan for the deficits they caused.
POTUSES can't spend a dime.
Congress controls the purse.
Too bad (damn shame) that many
voters do not understand this fact.
Zogby, I know this isn't very civil, but please just shut up.
THIS is why I ridicule Zogby. At least Carville's agency is upfront. We know it's a Dem machine. No pretense.
Want to know why the country is divided? Because Libs are sore losers incapable of tolerance. The civility referenced by Zogby was when Republicans were content with their minor status. Dare to challenge the status quo and suddenly all Hell breaks loose.
I do think this country needs healing, but isn't going to happen so long as our goals are divided. So long as this country has one group more devoted to power than preserving this union there is going to be constant clash.
BTW, I'm not even opposed towards argument. I'm opposed to domestic terrorism, which some of the Libs have been guilty of. But throwing a fist or two in a Senate Hall? Fine by me. I'd rather that expression of honest emotion than watered down phony smilies while plotting to stab the other in the back.
I just read your tagline!
Priceless. :)
Here's a cure.
1. Apply mustard plasters to faces of all DEMS.
2. Leave on faces for minimum of one hour.
3. Televise DEMS begging for mercy and confessing the errors of their ways.
2. Reapply fresh mustard plaster to any backsliders.
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