| Are we missing something?
In this case, the press wants to promote the idea that the public is against the war, because the press is full of liberal antiwar Democrats who are themselves against the war. What the poll really says is that the public isn't too happy about the way the war is going. But Democrats — the ones in the press and the ones in elected office — believe this means the public wants to cut and run. No one outside the 'nutroots' has ever said such a thing, but that's what the Donks want to hear, so it becomes what they do hear. I don't think we're missing anything. The Donks are re-confirming what everybody feared about them, which they had denied, which is that they are soft on defense and can't be trusted to defend the United States. They actually think Americans want to embrace self-inflicted defeat. McGovern thought that, too. He won Massachusetts and the District of Columbia... and nothing else. My take is that the Donks are being used. The public is using them to scare the Iraqis into getting off the dime about learning to defend their own country. To scare them properly, there has to be a credible threat that we will pull out. But the public doesn't really want to pull out. What they really want is for the Iraqis to get their act together. Once they do, the Donks will have (a) served their purpose, and (b) disqualified themselves from the Presidency for another twenty years. |
This happens a lot. The press tries to help the Donks by rigging the poll questions to produce some desired result. The Donks then believe the rigged poll.