The people don’t approve of President Clinton because of his policies.
Or so says a poll, and polls can’t lie, can they?
Sure they can, and they often do, not because they are “wrong,” as far as their numbers are concerned, but because some of them are actually designed to mislead.
Let us, as the boys in the English departments say, deconstruct this particular poll.
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It asked 1,200 adults whether they approved of Clinton’s job performance, and 52 percent did not. These disapprovers were then presented with several options to explain their disapproval, one of which was Clinton’s “tax and spend policies,” and 52 percent of the 52 percent chose that one.
So roughly a quarter of the electorate disapproves of the Clinton “tax and spend policies.” If anything, that understates the opposition. Most people are likely to oppose policies described in those words.
And who described them in those words? Republicans, that’s who. The poll was taken by a Republican firm for the Republican National Committee, which then trumpeted its own conclusion. A Democratic poll, no doubt, would ask about Clinton’s “deficit reduction package,” and end up with results far more favorable to the president.
There is neutral language. A pollster could ask about the president’s “economic policies,” or his “tax and budget proposals.” But that would produce only the truth, which may not be the desired result.
A poll, you see, can be used either as a tool of inquiry or as a political device. Its aim can be to find out what is going on, or to skew the debate. So when reading polls, the wise citizen will read the pollster, too. Whenever the poll reaches the conclusion its sponsor would like reached-look out!
And look out, too, when a survey reports something close to unanimity on any question. One recent poll found that 89 percent of the American people support the Brady Bill, which would require a five-day waiting period for anyone trying to buy a handgun.
Not likely. Though more people are for the Brady Bill than against it, it’s hard to get 89 percent of the American people to be for anything. If you asked a random cross-section of Americans whether they approve of apple pie, motherhood, truth, justice and the American way, 15 percent would probably disagree or declare themselves undecided. There are some ornery citizens out there.
It turns out that this poll, which received much attention, was financed by organizations which favor gun control. It also turns out that it didn’t ask respondents their opinions on gun control until the 24th question. Among the first 23 were whether people thought that “the availability of guns and the resulting violence” have affected children, and whether people were concerned that “a common cause of injury or death among family members, especially children, results from their either cleaning or playing around with a gun.”
The grammatical awkwardness of that question will not be explored here. The point is that such language cannot fail to influence, and distort, answers to subsequent questions. By planting images of the harm guns can do, especially to children, the questions create a mindset, altering the responses of a few hundred suggestible folks among the 1,250 who were questioned.
Another recent poll illustrated yet another method of distorting poll results: fiddle around with definitions. It’s easy, for instance, to re-classify ordinary behavior as a social evil. Just call it one. This was the trick used by the American Association of University Women (Look out!) when it commissioned a poll of 1,632 teenagers. From their answers the AAUW concluded that “sexual harassment” was rampant in American high schools. Obediently, the news business so reported it.
But the poll did not just ask kids if they had been sexually harassed. It asked specific questions: Had they been the butt of suggestive or sexual remarks? Had they been grabbed or touched or looked at (looked at!) in a manner they considered sexual?
Of course they had. Mostly it was looks and comments, though there had also been some touching, grabbing and pinching. More than half the girls reported that they had been “brushed up against in a sexual way.”
Only a little more than half? That’s what young teenage boys do. This is not sexual harassment. This is adolescence, a period of life in which immature people discover sex and react with embarrassment, insecurity and a bit of crudeness. In most-though not all-individual cases, it passes with the years. As a social phenomenon, it will persist as long as children keep being born and growing older.
If there is no excuse for the AAUW, there is at least some explanation for its dishonesty. For those who transmitted the information as interpreted, there is neither.