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Politics : Clinton's Scandals: Is this corruption the worst ever? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hippieslayer who wrote (5844)	9/15/1998 1:55:00 PM
From: Who, me?	Respond to of 13994

....draft dodging, pot smoking,cocaine snorting, flag burning, yellow bellied wimp, womanizer, pants dropping, baby killing, known liar crook...and I'm sure there's more! Beware bogus polls Clinton doing well in opinion polls, but voter surveys tell a different story By Jay Severin MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR Sept. 14 - Depending on what the polls say, an American presidency is about to end or survive. Approval ratings will shape news media coverage of the Clinton scandal; how the public perceives the event; whether and how aggressively Democrats stand by their president; whether and how aggressively Republicans insist on impeachment. INDEED, NOW that Bill Clinton's fate is officially a political matter and not a legal one, polls are the coin of the realm. But virtually none of the various poll results in newspapers, on television or quoted online are regarded seriously by members of Congress, who will be making these monumental decisions. The politicians are relying on polls, but not the ones you are seeing. How can you impeach a president with a 66 percent approval rating? Here's how: members of Congress, especially Democrats, are chiefly concerned with one issue - the impact of this political earthquake on their party and its 1998 candidates. The most compelling question in each lawmaker's mind is figuring out which position will help or hurt most on election day: defense of the president or the abandonment of him? ONLY VOTERS COUNT There is only one group that can meaningfully answer that question and it isn't just the American people. A political fact of life is that the opinions politicians are concerned with are the American people who vote. It is another fact of life that only half of all Americans eligible to vote actually do so. And those of us who do vote have markedly different (and fundamentally more conservative) attitudes than those who do not. As a result, the only public opinion polls that are going to genuinely influence this process are those that measure the attitudes of the people who are actually casting votes. These are not the polls you read about in the media. The only polls to genuinely influence this process are those that measure attitudes of people who are actually casting votes. The oft-quoted public opinion polls are essentially insignificant samplings of the opinions of "randomly selected adults" or, perhaps even "registered voters." Fully half of these people are not voters. What's more, these polls create a profile of the voting public that is a politically correct fantasy: each racial and ethnic group represented in exact proportion to their percentage of the population - even though they have never voted in that volume. There are, however, accurate polls. Actual participants in election day (known in the trade as "high-propensity likely voters") can be found through expensive and time-consuming professional screening techniques, which eliminate the ineligible and identify the actual voters. These polls - privately commissioned by political parties or aspirants and conducted by such firms as Zogby International - screen out all but actual voters, asking opinions of people who have voted in perhaps 10 of the last 11 elections. As a result, these high-priced and nearly always unpublished polls predict with great accuracy what will happen on election day. And that, not popular sentiment, is what politicians want and need to know CLINTON'S NOT FARING WELL And guess what? In the real-voter polls I have seen, Clinton is doing double-digits lower across the board than in the media polls. We can conclude from this that a major portion of the president's support right now is coming from people who don't vote. This explains why Democrats are so worried about the Clinton factor, even though he seems to be doing so well in the opinion polls you're hearing about in the media. So public opinion polls are interesting, and they do give a reading of a type of popular opinion. But public opinion is not what drives politics or politicians. Voters do. Which raises this significant question: are the news media merely ignorant of the fact their polls present a frankly inaccurate (and unrealistically pro-Clinton) picture of voters' opinions? Are they knowing counterfeiters? Or is it a legitimate (and not entirely unreasonable) argument that the president appears to have the support of two out of three citizens - whether they vote or not? Bogus polls aren't a crime but, in historic circumstances such as these, neither are they exactly a public service. Caveat emptor. Jay Severin is a veteran Republican campaign consultant and political analyst for MSNBC. msnbc.com