In 2008, TPM editor Josh Marshall speculated that DLC majordomo pollster Doug Schoen must be 'tokin the herb' for the advice he gave candidate Hillary Clinton, which as Marshall described it, was:
...to "portray Obama as an effete liberal, with San Francisco values, who is out of touch with ordinary Americans, who can't reach bipartisan compromises and is an extreme liberal. Or to put it another way, she must run against him as a Republican."
Today, Schoen has written an editorial in the Washington Post imploring now president Obama not to run for reelection in 2012. His 'me-too' coauthor is Patrick Caddell, another DLC pollster and occasional Fox News dickhead.
For Schoen, the upshot of this move is that Obama will be able to ignore senior citizens and unions (listed together with evil lobbyists in Schoen's writing) and welcome business leaders and Republicans (grouped together with desirable independents) into his policy-making. He will be able to "stand above it all and forge consensus."
Given the stridency with which Republicans approach 'consensus', we know that what this really means is that he'll be boxed in to governing as a Republican.
The GOP, which is unswerving in its deployment of a malicious partisan national campaign strategy is, as Schoen tells it, going to suddenly change everything they're doing if Obama withdraws, "draining the poison from our culture of polarization and ending the resentment and division that have eroded our national identity and common purpose."
For more howling bullshit, here's how he remembers himself in 2008 from the WaPo editorial:
Indeed, we were among those millions of Democrats, Republicans and independents who were genuinely moved by his [Obama's] rhetoric and purpose.
Yeah right Doug.
I suppose we may be able to take it as a good sign for Obama's second term that a DINO figure like Doug Schoen is lobbying with whatever shred of 'inside the tent' crediblity he has left for a summary judgment to get rid of Obama before the electorate has a chance to express itself. Maybe it's a sign of fear.
In the weeks I've been writing at Open Left, I've become more and more convinced that the use and misuse of polling data is an important factor pushing Democrats to the right. Like Pollack and O'Hanlon at Brookings, reports about polling shape the media narrative in a way that reinforces beltway conventional wisdom while being seemingly objective. It's not the data themselves - the numbers are the numbers, to some extent anyway - but the haphazard, mad scientist way in which they are often interpreted. Since I do a lot of data analysis in my real job, I have plenty of sympathy for pollsters. Survey data doesn't tend to lend itself to the clear, firm, concise answers of the type that would be useful for shaping policy. Public opinion can be contradictory and unstable. And most of all, thorough data analysis takes time, is picky, and generally ends up leaving things more complicated than they were when you started. Nevertheless, it's usually the fundamentals more than the statistics I have a problem with.
For example, I'm not really sure what Doug Schoen means when he says "Americans Want Hawkish Attitude Toward Iran" in his latest Rasmussen column. He strings together a series of seemingly unrelated polling findings about Iran (Americans followed Ahmadinejad's visit, didn't want him to visit ground zero, don't view Iran as an ally but are split on whether Iran is an enemy, and are split along partisan lines on the use of force in Iran over nuclear weapons) and concludes that
This strongly suggests that the electorate fully wants and expects the Presidential candidates to maintain a hawkish posture toward Iran during the campaign.
Now, that may or may not be true, but the data Schoen reports don't speak to the issue one way or another. Going off what Schoen reports in his column, I'd probably conclude the electorate is likely to be split along partisan lines, and that therefore what the electorate want to hear depends on which primary you're running in. But even the question about military force and nuclear weapons doesn't really match the conclusion he draws from it. I make further investigations into this matter in the extended text.
If Doug Schoen has data showing the American public prefers that Democrats work with Republicans even if it means not ending the war (which it does), he should show it to us.
Otherwise I'm going to be forced to conclude that he's lumping a bunch of unrelated findings together to arrive at the conclusion he himself prefers. Last week, Pew made the 'ambivalent' version of the argument that public opinion doesn't support ending the war. This week, Schoen makes the 'bipartisanship' version. It's a through-the-looking-glass inverse of Chris's amazingseries ofposts about the forthcoming Republican blurring strategy. Schoen apparently supports this strategy wholeheartedly.
Schoen uses some pieces of the ambivalent argument that Pew made. Such as here:
The electorate has had it with the war in Iraq -- close to two thirds want an orderly withdrawal of troops to begin immediately. That being said, the American people understand that to withdrawal completely and unilaterally without a clear strategy for pacifying the country is risky.
I've seen no evidence to suggest that those two findings are related in the way Schoen (or Pew) implies they are. It's at least equally plausible that Americans are telling pollsters that they recognize the risks of withdrawal, but still want to withdraw.
More unrelated findings from Schoen:
Polling from Penn Schoen & Berland shows a strong desire for the parties to work together to develop coherent, long term strategies to fight terrorism and protect American interests around the world.
Right now, Democrats clearly have the '08 advantage. The American people are fed up with George Bush and the Republicans. Democrats have opened up double-digit leads on party identification and the generic congressional vote.
But the Democratic Party is also vulnerable on Iraq, where the lead over the Republicans dropped 10 percent in August to a narrow four percent margin. Rather than harp on the withdrawal, the Democrats should continue to strike a bipartisan tone and refocus the debate to other international and domestic issues. This will help them carry the day in November 2008.
Again, the relationship between these findings is unclear. If the question Schoen refers to in the first paragraph quoted above was some variation of "would you prefer the parties to work together to accomplish America's goals, or would you prefer that they don't?" I'm sure a vast majority did say they preferred that the parties work together. Who would say no to that? But unless his polling question actually was a variation on "would you prefer that the Democrats give Bush another blank check for Iraq, or would you prefer that Democrats force Bush to end the war?" I'm not sure why the finding is relevant. Also, last week's ABC/Washington Post poll finds an 11 point gap in public trust on Iraq favoring Democrats. 42% of those surveyed say they trust Democrats to "do a better job handling Iraq" compared to 31% who trust Republicans. Almost 20% say they trust neither party - and that number has almost doubled in the last year. I couldn't find cross-tabs by party identification for that question, but I'd guess a fair fraction of those who trust neither party are the same disgruntled Democrats responsible for low Congressional approval ratings. Last, Iraq is the single most important issue for a plurality of the electorate. Ignoring the most important issue of our time to focus on other priorities is a recipe for electoral disaster. Why would anyone think that ducking debate on the issue that's most important to voters, especially when they agree with you, is a good idea? It baffles me.
Public opinion has turned decisively against the war. Vast majorities say they want to withdraw now or on a timeline that is almost indistinguishable logistically from now. Unless there is some indication that Republicans are willing to work to actually end the war, rather than work to keep it going while pretending to end it, there is no basis for bipartisanship. Those Democrats who want to end the war will have to do so without Republican support. This is an issue where Democrats can succeed by giving the public exactly what they want. It's not complicated.
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