Obama the Polling President

President Obama, like most of our modern Presidents, is quickly learning how to take the national temperature.   Presidents have long pooh-poohed polls while privately conducting them. Jimmy Carter had Patrick Caddell, Reagan had Dick Wirthlin, and Bill Clinton relied on Mark Penn for weekly, personal briefings on the numbers.

The only problem here is that Obama campaigned on the fact he was new, somehow different from the old, a man who led by convictions and righteous principles or so he had us think. “Obama declared that “the same old Washington textbook campaigns just won’t do.” Deploring “triangulating and poll-driven positions,” he said that “telling the American people what we think they want to hear instead of telling the American people what they need to hear just won’t do.” The Democratic Party had been at its best, he told the crowd, when “we led, not by polls, but by principles; not by calculation, but by conviction.”

My fear is that Obama’s incessant need to poll the general public instead of leading by his convictions or principles, which he’s apparently short on hence the need to poll, will lead down a path of spaghetti policy.  Spaghetti policy meaning many cross cutting strands of policy all leading in different directions and having no national cohesion.  Polling leads to reactionary behavior hence reactionary policy, not leadership. As FDR said, “a reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards.”

Polling is nice when you want to know who might win American Idol but when it comes to politics I would rather have a leader who held to the principles he campaigned on, isn’t that who we voted into office?  Besides there’s no telling where polling data will lead us…

I wonder how giving the queen an ipod polled?