THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, May 31, 1995 TAG: 9505270025
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 54 lines
Once, polls were used to tell leaders if their programs were playing in Peoria. Now Peoria tells pollsters its prejudices, pollsters tell politicians and they run to the front of the parade and pretend to be leading. Vox populi, vox Dei.
It isn't hard to imagine the day when the average office seeker will embrace any policy that attracts the magic number of 60 percent approval. Then we won't have leaders but marionettes with poll numbers jerking them around.
The process is already under way. The Contract With America was pretested. Any idea that didn't attract 60 percent approval was eliminated.
The same technique was used to create the Christian Coalition's Contract with the American Family. Since the Coalition claims to be seeking a moral renewal, its use of polls to set an agenda seems odd.
Can morality be rounded to the nearest decimal point? If polling had shown that only 40 percent of Philistines agreed with ideas like ``Blessed are the meek,'' would they have been dropped from the Gospels?
In recent days presidential hopeful Sen. Phil Gramm pushed hard in the Senate to include a huge tax cut in the budget, even though achieving balance is going to be very difficult without digging the hole even deeper.
Asked to justify Gramm's position, political-adviser Charles Black didn't say it was politically feasible or made economic sense. He said their private polling showed the magic 60 percent of the public favored the idea.
Of course, politicians of both parties play the game. When President Clinton was a candidate in 1992, he suddenly endorsed tax cuts when polling showed that's what primary voters wanted to hear. But what if 60 percent of the people favored protectionism or vigilante justice, resegregation or huge deficits? Would that make them good politics?
In a constitutional democracy, leaders can't rule by fiat. They've got to persuade. They can't get too far ahead of the public or they lose their ability to influence events. But that means only that they've got to explain the merits of their policies and get voters to agree. It doesn't mean they can forget about leading and follow wherever the polls take them.
Yet that tendency seems to be growing. No wonder the public has come to view politicians as wafflers and waverers rather than as men and women of principle. No wonder they come across as characters who'll say one thing and do another, unreliable jellies who lack spine or inconsistent panderers who promote self-contradictory policies.
It's a worrying trend. If public opinion had driven past public policy, would an American Revolution have been fought, the Civil War won or the civil rights movement conducted? One wonders. by CNB