Krauthammer Lie: Bush NOT poll
driven
Media Matters
December 6, 2005
Summary: Despite ample evidence that polling data play a big part in Bush
administration political strategy and messaging, Charles Krauthammer claimed
that President Bush "is probably the least poll-driven president in
history."
On the December 2 edition of Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume,
syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer claimed that President Bush "is
probably the least poll-driven president in history." This characterization of
Bush has been repeatedly put forth by administration supporters -- and the
president himself -- ever since his 2000 presidential campaign. But while Bush
has gone to great lengths to create the impression that he doesn't rely on
polling, there is ample evidence that polling data play a substantial part in
his administration's political strategy and messaging.
During the 2000 campaign, Bush often emphasized his purported lack of
interest in studies of public opinion. "I really don't care what the polls and
focus groups say," he said prior to the second presidential debate. "What I
care about is doing what I think is right" [CBS' The Early Show, 10/11/00].
Following his election, Bush's aides and supporters continued to highlight what
they claimed was a clear distinction between Bush and President Clinton, whose
reliance on polling data was well documented. In a speech shortly after Bush's
inauguration, Vice President Dick Cheney stated: "The days of the war room and
the permanent campaign are over. This president and this administration are
going to change the tone in the city of Washington."
Several months later, however, White House officials' repeated use of
certain catchphrases in public statements on the administration's national
energy policy caught the attention of Time magazine reporters James Carney and
John F. Dickerson. In a May 18, 2001, article, they identified certain
frequently occurring words (such as "balanced," "comprehensive," "leadership,"
and "modern") in the "White House's quiver of talking points." Carney and
Dickerson went on to report:
Forgive us for being cynical, but years of training -- plus the "find"
feature on Microsoft Word -- led us to a startling hypothesis: the Bush White
House had tested certain words, phrases and ideas in polls and focus groups
before launching its national energy policy.
And, in fact, they have been. Jan van Lohuizen, a Washington pollster who
worked for the Bush campaign and now polls for the Republican National
Committee, has been testing feelings and reactions to the President's energy
plan for weeks. It is true that this White House is less poll-driven than its
predecessor, but the difference is getting harder and harder to see.
A July 4, 2001, USA Today article on the Bush administration's ongoing
political operation delved deeper into the White House's polling operation:
Clinton's reliance on opinion polls was derided by Republicans who said he
followed polls, not principles or conviction.
Bush says he doesn't care about polls, and he may not pay attention to those
taken for the nation's newspapers and TV networks. But the White House does pay
attention to polls and focus groups paid for by the RNC and conducted by Bush's
former campaign pollster, Matthew Dowd.
Dowd says he doesn't test which policy positions the White House should
adopt. Once Bush takes a position, though, Dowd tries to gauge how voters will
respond. His results are used to help sell a plan like the tax cut or education
program to the public by determining which points to emphasize. The polls also
help aides predict which parts of a given proposal will be unpopular and
prepare to answer critics.
"We pay attention to them," Card says of polls. "But we aren't driven by
them."
American University's [James] Thurber says the administration's wide-ranging
political efforts are among the most sophisticated he's seen -- and he says
they are part of a necessary strategy for any White House.
"They're realists," he says of Bush and his aides. "They indeed criticized
the Clinton administration for doing it, and now they're doing it in their own
way. But that's normal. It's naive to think that they would do anything
else."
More information about the Bush White House's use of public opinion data
emerged in Joshua Green's April 2002 Washington Monthly article headlined "The
Other War Room." Green examined the amount Bush had spent on polling during the
first year of his presidency and described the Bush administration as "a
frequent consumer of polls"; though he reported that the administration takes
"extraordinary measures" to appear otherwise:
Republican National Committee filings show that Bush actually uses polls
much more than he lets on, in ways both similar and dissimilar to Clinton. Like
Clinton, Bush is most inclined to use polls when he's struggling. It's no
coincidence that the administration did its heaviest polling last summer, after
the poorly received rollout of its energy plan, and amid much talk of the
"smallness" of the presidency. A Washington Monthly analysis of Republican
National Committee disbursement filings revealed that Bush's principal
pollsters received $346,000 in direct payments in 2001. Add to that the
multiple boutique polling firms the administration regularly employs for
specialized and targeted polls and the figure is closer to $1 million. That's
about half the amount Clinton spent during his first year; but while Clinton
used polling to craft popular policies, Bush uses polling to spin unpopular
ones -- arguably a much more cynical undertaking.
Bush's principal pollster, Jan van Lohuizen, and his focus-group guru, Fred
Steeper, are the best-kept secrets in Washington. Both are respected but
low-key, proficient but tight-lipped, and, unlike such larger-than-life Clinton
pollsters as Dick Morris and Mark Penn, happy to remain anonymous. They toil in
the background, poll-testing the words and phrases the president uses to sell
his policies to an often-skeptical public; they're the Bush administration's
Cinderella. "In terms of the modern presidency," says Ron Faucheux, editor of
Campaigns & Elections, "van Lohuizen is the lowest-profile pollster we've
ever had."
Just as Carney and Dickerson had examined how polling data determined the
presentation of Bush's energy plan, Green reported how Bush relied on pollsters
in marketing his Social Security proposals:
On the last day of February [2002], the Bush administration kicked off its
renewed initiative to privatize Social Security in a speech before the National
Summit on Retirement Savings in Washington, D.C. Rather than address "Social
Security," Bush opted to speak about "retirement security." And during the
brief speech he repeated the words "choice" (three times), "compound interest"
(four times), "opportunity" (nine times) and "savings" (18 times). These words
were not chosen lightly. The repetition was prompted by polls and focus groups.
During the campaign, Steeper honed and refined Bush's message on Social
Security (with key words such as "choice," "control," and "higher returns"),
measuring it against Al Gore's attack through polls and focus groups ("Wall
Street roulette," "bankruptcy" and "break the contract"). Steeper discovered
that respondents preferred Bush's position by 50 percent to 38 percent, despite
the conventional wisdom that tampering with Social Security is political
suicide. He learned, as he explained to an academic conference last February,
that "there's a great deal of cynicism about the federal government being able
to do anything right, which translated to the federal government not having the
ability to properly invest people's Social Security dollars." By couching
Bush's rhetoric in poll-tested phrases that reinforced this notion, and adding
others that stress the benefits of privatization, he was able to capitalize on
what most observers had considered to be a significant political disadvantage.
(Independent polls generally find that when fully apprised of Bush's plan,
including the risks, most voters don't support it.)
This is typical of how the Bush administration uses polls: Policies are
chosen beforehand, polls used to spin them. Because many of Bush's policies
aren't necessarily popular with a majority of voters, Steeper and van
Lohuizen's job essentially consists of finding words to sell them to the
public.
In the Summer 2003 edition of The Brookings Review, Brookings Institution
senior fellow Kathryn Dunn Tenpas further highlighted how, rather than avoid
polling, the Bush White House has simply tried to hide its reliance on polls --
an effort aided by administration supporters, such as Krauthammer, who help
foster the image of a White House unconcerned about gauges of public
opinion:
In a way, Bush's approach to polling is the opposite of Clinton's. He uses
polls but conceals that fact, and, instead of polling to ensure that new
policies have broad public support, takes policies favored by his conservative
base and polls on how to make them seem palatable to mainstream voters. This
pattern extends to the entire administration. Whereas Clinton's polling data
were regularly circulated among the staff, Bush limits his to the handful of
senior advisers who attend Rove's "strategery meetings." According to White
House aides, the subject is rarely broached with the president or at other
senior staff meetings. "The circle is tight," Matthew Dowd, Bush's chief of
polling, testifies. "Very tight." As with Kennedy and Nixon, the Bush
administration keeps its polling data under lock and key.
[...]
Indeed, the unprecedented visibility and perceived influence of Clinton's
pollsters created much advance interest in President George W. Bush's
prospective pollsters. But Bush's determination to be the "anti-Clinton" and
his repeated campaign promises to give polls and focus groups no role in his
administration led him to relegate his pollsters to near anonymity. Still,
their low profile, particularly compared with that of Clinton's pollsters, has
not kept them from performing essential polling for the White House.
Like Green and Thurber, Tenpas conceded that the Bush White House's reliance
on public opinion is relatively standard from a historical perspective. What is
"unusual," she went on to write, is the stark contrast between the
administration's rhetoric and its actions on the issue:
President Bush's use of polling is by no means pathbreaking, nor is the
amount of polling particularly astounding. What is unusual about the Bush
team's polling operation is the chasm between its words and actions. Never
before has a White House engaged in such anti-polling rhetoric or built up such
a buffer between the pollsters and the president.
Krauthammer's characterization of Bush as "probably the least poll-driven
president in history" came during a "Fox All-Star Panel" discussion of the
president's recent efforts to shore up public support for the Iraq war. In this
context, Krauthammer's comments are particularly misleading, as recent news
reports have shown that the Bush administration has relied heavily on pollsters
in devising its political strategy on Iraq. A June 30 Washington Post article,
published two days after Bush gave a prime-time speech on the war, reported
that the White House had hired "experts on public opinion during wartime" to
aide in this effort:
When President Bush confidently predicts victory in Iraq and admits no
mistakes, admirers see steely resolve and critics see exasperating
stubbornness. But the president's full-speed-ahead message articulated in this
week's prime-time address also reflects a purposeful strategy based on
extensive study of public opinion about how to maintain support for a costly
and problem-plagued military mission.
The White House recently brought onto its staff one of the nation's top
academic experts on public opinion during wartime, whose studies are now
helping Bush craft his message two years into a war with no easy end in sight.
Behind the president's speech is a conviction among White House officials that
the battle for public opinion on Iraq hinges on their success in convincing
Americans that, whatever their views of going to war in the first place, the
conflict there must and can be won.
One of the two experts cited by name in the Post article, Duke University
professor Peter D. Feaver, was more recently reported to have played a central
role in the writing of "Our National Strategy for Victory in Iraq," a 35-page
document released by the Bush administration on November 30. Feaver's analysis
of polling data on Iraq was "clearly behind the victory theme" in both the
document and Bush's November 30 speech on the topic, according to a December 4
New York Times article:
Although White House officials said many federal departments had contributed
to the document, its relentless focus on the theme of victory strongly
reflected a new voice in the administration: Peter D. Feaver, a Duke University
political scientist who joined the N.S.C. staff as a special adviser in June
and has closely studied public opinion on the war.
Despite the president's oft-stated aversion to polls, Dr. Feaver was
recruited after he and Duke colleagues presented the administration with an
analysis of polls about the Iraq war in 2003 and 2004. They concluded that
Americans would support a war with mounting casualties on one condition: that
they believed it would ultimately succeed.
That finding, which is questioned by other political scientists, was clearly
behind the victory theme in the speech and the plan, in which the word appears
six times in the table of contents alone, including sections titled "Victory in
Iraq is a Vital U.S. Interest" and "Our Strategy for Victory is Clear."
"This is not really a strategy document from the Pentagon about fighting the
insurgency," said Christopher F. Gelpi, Dr. Feaver's colleague at Duke and
co-author of the research on American tolerance for casualties. "The Pentagon
doesn't need the president to give a speech and post a document on the White
House Web site to know how to fight the insurgents. The document is clearly
targeted at American public opinion."
From the December 2 edition of Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume:
JIM ANGLE [guest host]: All right. About a minute left. That raises the
question of why the president and the Pentagon haven't paid more attention to
public opinion and haven't done more to make sure that they weren't losing this
war in the halls of Congress. What do you think, Charles?
KRAUTHAMMER: The president, I think, is a person who leads and he is
probably the least poll-driven president in our history. Succeeding the most
poll-driven president in our history, Bill Clinton. And I think he's ignored
that. I think he understands that diplomacy, public diplomacy at home is
extremely important. But in the end, his words aren't going to make a
difference, it's going to be what's happening on the ground. If our casualties
are reduced, we will succeed, I think, in changing public opinion, otherwise
it's not going to happen.
|