Americans are stupid

By Michael J.W. Stickings

No, no, no, that's not me talking -- perish the thought! -- that's Newsweek, which has conducted yet another test of American civic knowledge (or lack thereof) and found Americans, er, wanting:

How Dumb Are We?

NEWSWEEK gave 1,000 Americans the U.S. Citizenship Test -- 38 percent failed. The country's future is imperiled by our ignorance.

Indeed, the results hardly make one optimistic. The test includes easy questions on the Founding (e.g., name one of the writers of The Federalist), the Constitution (e.g., what are the first ten amendments called?), key figures in U.S. history (e.g., what was Martin Luther King, Jr. known for?), and current political figures (e.g., name the vice president), and, well, Americans should be embarrassed.

But we knew all this already, didn't we? Did we need yet another "test" to learn that far too many Americans know next to nothing about their history and politics? We have some updated quantifiable "proof," I suppose, but otherwise I'm not sure the exercise is worth much. (Besides, political and historical ignorance is hardly an American phenomenon. Trust me, I've gone to school not just in the U.S. but in Canada and Germany as well and ignorance is alive and well everywhere, if not necessarily to this appalling degree.)

And yet, credit Newsweek, there is at least some attempt here to explain the ignorance:

It doesn't help that the United States has one of the highest levels of income inequality in the developed world, with the top 400 households raking in more money than the bottom 60 percent combined. As Dalton Conley, an NYU sociologist, explains, "it's like comparing apples and oranges. Unlike Denmark, we have a lot of very poor people without access to good education, and a huge immigrant population that doesn't even speak English." When surveys focus on well-off, native-born respondents, the U.S. actually holds its own against Europe.

Other factors exacerbate the situation. A big one, Hacker argues, is the decentralized U.S. education system, which is run mostly by individual states: "When you have more centrally managed curricula, you have more common knowledge and a stronger civic culture." Another hitch is our reliance on market-driven programming rather than public broadcasting, which, according to the EJC study, "devotes more attention to public affairs and international news, and fosters greater knowledge in these areas."

It also doesn't help that Americans don't seem to take primary and secondary education seriously enough, or that a sense of extreme complacency has set in. The problem is that the world is rapidly passing America by:

For more than two centuries, Americans have gotten away with not knowing much about the world around them. But times have changed -- and they've changed in ways that make civic ignorance a big problem going forward. While isolationism is fine in an isolated society, we can no longer afford to mind our own business. What happens in China and India (or at a Japanese nuclear plant) affects the autoworker in Detroit; what happens in the statehouse and the White House affects the competition in China and India. Before the Internet, brawn was enough; now the information economy demands brains instead. And where we once relied on political institutions (like organized labor) to school the middle classes and give them leverage, we now have nothing.

The article examining the results of the test is actually quite hard-hitting, exposing some of the brutal truth about an empire that is declining and falling before our very eyes.

America sinks further and further into ignorance at its everlasting peril.

Beware those who don't heed history's lessons: A review of HBO's Triangle: Remembering the Fire

By Edward Copeland

"People forget the Triangle fire at their peril... If people want to know what deregulated industry would look like, look at the bodies on the sidewalk outside the Triangle building."
Leigh Benin, Adelphi University labor historian

With big corporations seeking to gain more and more power by using bought-and-paid-for politicians to strip away regulations and weaken workers' rights, there couldn't be a better time to look back at the tragedy of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire, which killed 146 people 100 years ago March 25 and brought about the reforms and labor movements billionaires and the historically ignorant seek to dismantle today. A well-done and brief primer on the fire and the events leading up to it and its aftermath premieres on HBO tonight. Triangle: Remembering the Fire debuts at 9 p.m. EDT and PDT / 8 p.m. CDT.

For those unfamiliar with the story of the Triangle fire, this 45-minute documentary gives you almost all you need to know about the 100-year-old tragedy and offers lessons needed for today as it seems we risk the rise of a new Gilded Age where tycoons value profits over the safety of their workers and the government at both the state and national level seems to be more-than-willing co-conspirators with its push to deregulate anything and everything. If one wants to look for modern examples of this, they need looks no further than the lack of safety enforcement at various coal mines that have cost many miners their lives, the BP Gulf disaster which killed their own workers and destroyed an ecosystem and the "fracking" techniques used in the search for natural gas that has been linked to poisoned water sources, cancer deaths and possibly even earthquakes, all of which exploration companies were exempted from environmental laws under the Bush Administration. This doesn't even take into account how the blind eye of regulators allowed financial speculators to cause the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression and a housing bubble that sparked a foreclosure debacle. Just last week, both parties in Congress, led by Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., all still doing the bidding of the big banks, sought to delay the huge fees the banks collect on debit card transactions for another two years, weakening already toothless financial reform legislation. Obama's Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner also is rumored to further water down the reform by exempting currency derivatives from transparency requirements in the legislation. Yes, government of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations shall not perish from the United States it seems.

In 1911, out of the ashes of the tragedy of the Triangle fire came reforms for workers, first in the state of New York, that laid the groundwork for FDR's New Deal when he became president 22 years later, reforms that politicians backed by rich businessmen seek to dismantle today as we've seen in states such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio with more on the way.

Tovah Feldshuh narrates Triangle: Remembering the Fire and her calm voice serves perfectly as an invisible teacher. The Triangle Waistshirt Company was one of many businesses associated with the garment industry in the early part of the 20th century in New York. Co-owners Max Blanck and Isaac Harris had hit upon a new trend in ladies' fashion: basically, the blouse. For the first time, women were wearing separate tops just as men did. It made them rich and their company occupied the top three floors of one of downtown Manhattan's newest skyscrapers, the 10-story Asch Building at the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street. The building, now known as the Brown Building and part of the NYU campus, still stands and has been registered a National Historic Landmark and a New York City landmark.

With the huge demand for their product, the Triangle company workers tended to be on the job seven days a week for long hours and little pay and the people willing to be exploited this way did so because they had no other choice. They tended to be newly arrived European immigrants who had been fleeing famine and persecution. Not only did they not find the American dream in their work situation, most could only find living arrangements in tenements on the lower eastside. In the case of the garment industry, most of these virtual slaves were women, especially young women, some not even teenagers yet. To get as much production going as possible, the ninth floor of the Asch Building had been stacked to capacity with 300 sewing machines, leaving barely any elbow room for the workers inside. About a year and a half before the Triangle fire in November 1909, The International Ladies Garment Union Workers Union staged a massive strike demanding better working conditions for women. The 20,000 female strikers who took to the streets was unprecedented — and this was taking place more than a decade before women had the right to vote in the United States. It really was the first head-on clash between the tycoons of The Gilded Age and their corrupt political minions ensconced in Tammany Hall and the growing progressive movement. The strikers may have been women, but it didn't prevent Tammany from sending out police and hired thugs to arrest them and get rough. By the time the strike ended, the workers at Triangle returned to their sewing machines without any union recognition.

As we see today when the gap between what company CEOs make and the wages given to their average workers have reached startling disparities, similar differences existed at the time between company owners and the average Americans. For example, Triangle co-owner Max Blanck surrounded himself with servants and spent more than $100,000 to renovate his home, quite a contrast when the average American in 1911 only made $300 to $600 a year. Yet Blanck and other company heads didn't want to spring for the readily available sprinkler systems for new buildings or follow the recommendation of New York Fire Chief Ed Croker who, after a similarly tragic fire at a Newark, N.J., factory a mere four months before the Triangle fire had killed 25 workers, again mostly women, had suggested that buildings routinely practice fire drills. Company owners, always focusing on the bottom line, felt drills would affect work productivity and since no government regulations existed to enforce the sprinklers or the drills, they had no one twisting their arms to do the right thing.

What's so compelling about Triangle: Remembering the Fire is not just recounting all that missteps that led to the tragedy and can anger you a century later even when the event occurred long before you were born, but also the interviews with people related to both survivors and victims of the blaze. The filmmakers interview Suzanne Pred Bass who had two great-aunts who were in the fire, one who survived, one who didn't, presumably because they lost sight of each other in the smoke that quickly enveloped the ninth floor.

The cause of the fire has never been clear, but most believe a still-burning cigarette tossed into a trash can on the eighth floor quickly consumed the three floors. The switchboard operator on eight notified the 10th floor and the fire department immediately but in her haste, forgot to tell the ninth floor. Though the documentary doesn't confirm it as fact or legend, the story goes that of the two fire escapes on the ninth floor, they kept one locked so that when workers left for the day, they could be searched to make certain that they weren't stealing anything. Those who did survive from the ninth did so thanks to the heroics of elevator operator Joseph Zito who kept overloading his vehicle to get as many out as he could until it finally collapsed under the weight of the panicked who leaped down the elevator shaft to escape the flames. Most of the people on 10 were able to flee thanks to people in a neighboring building who got ladders across the space between the two buildings. Even though the fire department arrived two minutes after receiving the call, once they got to the Asch Building, the ladder trucks only reached to the sixth floor. Many of those who died were killed jumping to their deaths. At first, some bystanders thought they were tossing bundles of clothes out the windows to save them until they spotted the legs, arms and faces beneath them. Some hit the pavement so hard they crashed through glass plates on the sidewalk. In all, 146 died, 129 women and girls and 17 men. The blaze consumed all three floors in just 18 minutes from the time the blaze started and that 18 minute mark was when the last body hit the ground. Of the 146 deaths, 90 leaped to escape the flames.

The horror of what happened led Al Smith, a Democrat thick in Tammany Hall politics who would later lose the presidency to Herbert Hoover, to shake off the cronyism and lead the fight for reforms. New York led the way for proper workweeks and pay and, most importantly, safety conditions for its citizens. It even began to set up a pension system for those too old to work any longer, all ideas that Franklin Roosevelt would bring nationwide in the New Deal. The tragedy showed the need for strong unions and for the government to be for the people, not the corporations, and it is frightening to see the backpedaling that is happening today. Blanck and Harris eventually did face criminal charges for the deaths of their workers, but they were acquitted by an all-male jury and since they had lots of insurance, the fire didn't do much damage to them at all. Because many of the bodies were charred so badly, six couldn't be positively identified but in a separate feature, Triangle: The Unidentified, available only on HBO OnDemand, co-producer and historian Michael Hirsch uses research and genealogical techniques unavailable 100 years ago to give names for the first time to those resting in a mass grave in the Evergreen Cemetery in Brooklyn so now when the names of the dead are ready every year, those unidentified six can now join the other 140.

Triangle: Remembering the Fire premieres tonight at 9 p.m. EDT and PDT / 8 p.m CDT. You owe it to yourself to watch.

Bill Maher to the Teabaggers: "The Founding Fathers would have hated your guts."

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I'm generally not much of a Bill Maher fan, even if I agree with more often than not, but I think he's quite right about this. The Founding Fathers would have hated the Teabaggers, and vice versa.

Mustang Bobby posted the clip at his place yesterday. Here it is for your edifying amusement -- the part about the Teabaggers starts at 2:51, but it's all pretty good:

Nullification nonsense: How conservatives mistake the Constitution for the Articles of Confederation

Guest post by Publius 

Publius has lived in and spent most of his life thinking about Washington, D.C. He is an attorney, an avid sports fan, and the editor of The Fourth Branch.

(Ed. note: This is Publius's second guest post for us. You can find his first, on George Will and "engaged justices," here. -- MJWS)

**********

Many have noted the irony of conservative politicians running on a platform of undying love for and understanding of the Constitution while simultaneously advocating the repeal of many of its significant provisions. Vocal elements of the conservative base, primarily centered on the Tea Party and pundits on Fox News, have advocated for repealing part of Section 1 of the 14th Amendment (citizenship) and all of the 16th Amendment (income tax) and 17th Amendment (direct election of Senators). Those would be significant changes to the nation's governing text, but they pale in comparison to the most recent calls for change involving nullification.

The so-called "Tenther" movement holds that the Congress continues to pass "unconstitutional" laws that are beyond Congress' power to enact, and that the states have the right, under the Tenth Amendment, to reject all such laws. The legal theory behind the Tenther movement isn't novel, but it is one that has been soundly rejected -- politically, legally, and militarily. The doctrine was used by the South to justify its continued use of slavery prior to the Civil War. It led to the South invoking nullification's close relative, secession, as the ultimate exercise of state sovereignty. Military elimination of the doctrine and the racist policies supported by the doctrine cost the lives of over 600,000 Americans. The Constitution itself was born following a failed history with a legal document codifying the concept of nullification -- the Articles of Confederation.

Given the racist past of nullification and secession, and the severe strain both policies placed on the nation and the Constitution as a whole, one would think the conservative movement would stray far from such policies. Instead, nullification has found new life and even a place on the ballot in many states. In Oklahoma, Missouri, Arizona, and Colorado, voters have been asked to "nullify" the recent health-care law, and nullification passed in each of those states but Colorado. Virginia recently passed a law through the legislature "repealing" health care with respect to that state. None of these efforts have any legal significance (which ought to be a sign that they aren't constitutional, but I digress).

Of course, health-care reform isn't the only law targeted by Tenthers for nullification. According to the Tenth Amendment Center (which is pushing many of the nullification efforts), other laws targeted for nullification include medical marijuana laws, firearm control laws, cap and trade (which hasn't even been enacted yet), EPA regulations, and more. In addition to repealing laws, the Tenthers advocate passing laws or constitutional amendments which restrict the definition of "interstate commerce" (which would restrict Congress' ability to pass laws, because many laws are passed under the Commerce Clause), require state approval of federal tax laws, and require a return to the gold/silver standard.

It ought to be obvious that such efforts, if enacted, would effectively eliminate the federal government. If the federal government, for example, could not pass a budget without state approval, or could not raise taxes from residents of a state until that state consented, the federal government would be crippled. How do we know this? Because it was already tried once before and it failed miserably with the Articles of Confederation.

Under the Articles of Confederation, the Confederation Congress could pass laws, but the power of enforcement lay with the states. Furthermore, Congress itself had no power of taxation -- all revenue had to be requested by the states. Substantively, such provisions in the Articles of Confederation are identical to granting states under the Constitution the power of nullification. Under the Articles of Confederation, the federal government neared insolvency, inflation of the "continental dollar" skyrocketed so much that the saying "not worth a continental" was born, and the military, desperate for funding which rarely came from Congress, was authorized to confiscate whatever property it needed to carry on the Revolutionary War.

Notwithstanding these clear lessons from our past and the bloodiest war fought in U.S. history, many in the conservative base continue arguing that embedded in the Tenth Amendment is the state right to nullify unconstitutional laws. Taking the next step in the logical nullification process, even conservative elected officials have articulated a state right to secession, including Republican Governor Rick Perry of Texas, Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC, arguably the head of the Tea Party), Rep. Steve King (R-IA), Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), and more.

Arguments for nullification and even secession are, more subtly, a rejection of Article III of the Constitution, which establishes the judiciary and gives it the sole right to interpret the Constitution, and Article VI of the Constitution, which establishes constitutional and federal supremacy. Any state that considers a law to be beyond the powers of Congress can challenge that law in the courts (as many have done with the health-care law, for example). The courts then make a determination as to the constitutionality of that law and, provided it is constitutional, the law is then binding upon all states pursuant to Article VI of the Constitution. Nullification shifts that decision-making process away from the judiciary and into the hands of the state political classes. In effect, the role of the judiciary as a constitutional arbiter is eliminated.

Nullification proponents are quite familiar with the role of the judiciary and its ability to nullify unconstitutional laws. Simply put, such proponents have zero confidence in the judiciary and seek to re-write Article III.

The Tea Party's admiration for the Constitution appears to end where Article III, Article VI, and Amendments 14, 16, and 17 begin. It is an admiration that ignores the historical fact that the Constitution was enacted to establish a stronger central government as a replacement for the weaker state-centered government that was failing miserably. It is a devotion that calls for violent "second amendment remedies" when Congress and/or the courts take an action with which one may disagree. It is a love that calls for a return to policies that supported the racial oppression of millions to the shame of a nation. It is a love of the Constitution that would cause its demise.

Waits & measures

By Carl 

Another year over, another year deeper in debt. 

Our lives are a constant stream of measurements, of statistics.

How much do you make? Were you on time? You weigh what? Did you get enough? Twelve inches in a foot. 100 pennies in a dollar. 60 seconds in a minute. Four cups to a quart.

It's funny how we've allowed our world, our culture, to be defined by one measurement after another. It's all weights and measures. We've trivialized measurement so much that, when we really need it, we can't have it.

"Give me the odds, doc? Fifty-fifty? Worse?"

You'll never get a straight answer to that from any doctor who cares about his malpractice insurance premium (yet another measurement derived from the measurement of his vulnerability to a lawsuit). Some court will decide -- will measure -- his judgement and hold him accountable if things don't go the way you want them to.

Our world has become a yardstick. We even measure the unmeasurable: The Beatles are better than Led Zeppellin, but "Stairway To Heaven" is the greatest rock song ever written.

Who the hell decided that? Why was it even necessary? Both bands make great music, and you could stack "Hey Jude" up against "Stairway" any day and derive enormous pleasure from either or both.

Worse yet is how we measure each other. It's one thing to hold yourself up to a standard of your choosing. That's how we grow and pursue happiness, that delectable intangible that the American Founders thought so important as to enumerate it amongst our God-given rights.

For example, I write better today than I did when I started blogging more than six years ago (!!!) I take better photographs for taking a course, and just shooting photos. These are demonstrable facts in my view. This is growth. I know these are facts because I like my writing and photos better today than I ever have.

It's when we apply these measurements to other people that trouble begins.

Exhibit A -- "You're just like my ex!"

That's your basic unfavorable expression, no matter the context, and serves as a warning.

Exhibit B -- "You should do this."

Friends of mine who've spent any time talking to me will tell you, I think "should" is the most dangerous word in the English language. It's so loaded with value measurements and personal opinion that it ought to be banned, except for parents talking to young children and priests talking to novitiates.

You can try this exercise on your own, I won't bore you with myriad examples.

We hold people up to a light, and look thru them as if they lived in a tiny glass orb and examine them. Instead of accepting them for who they are, we pull out a clipboard and a checklist and begin to tick off measurements: She's hot, he's getting C's, she's Jewish, he's an only child, she has money, he's a gambler. All these are added together and some arbitrary denominator is applied to adjudge good or bad.

None of this is about who that person or those people are, but about how those values fit in with ours.

How they add to our lives.

These can be applied situationally: "I need to get laid," means that "she's hot" can override the fact that she's only sixteen or a crack addict. That one measure derives the most immediate reward.

But in exploiting her, you exploit yourself.

"He's getting Cs" means an Ivy League school is probably out of the question, so you lower your sights and adjust your parenting.

Our world isn't full of men and women, our brothers and sisters. It's filled with competitors, all of whom we gauge on a scale, on a ruler, to assess how we're doing. For some weird reason, it matters to us where we are on the ruler, without any consideration given at all to the possibility that maybe we shouldn't even be on the ruler!

Are we happier for this ruler? I think not.

How can you measure the value of a sister or brother? Of the homeless guy down the street? Of the undocumented worker selling portraits in Times Square? All contribute to our lives each day, some in directly noticeable ways, others in ways that filter through to us from a maze of convolutions and twists: six degrees of separation, and all that.

What numerical analysis leads us to the inescapable conclusion that Bill Gates made billions of dollars using the sweat and labor of hundreds of millions of people, who developed and used his products and gave him feedback, thus improving computers? Similarly, what is his responsibility back to society? According to the measurerists, there ought to be some way for him to pay us back beyond the distinctly unmeasurable "he sells us software." And yet, these measurerists are the same folks who bridle at the "death tax", which is really just a way for society to extract from a person's body of work that portion of which can be attributed to the advantages of living in that society.

We can't measure the important things in our lives. What is love? How much did my mother love me? How much do I love my lover? How much do I love ice cream? How happy am I? How happy can I be? How afraid am I? How healthy am I?

We can tally nearly everything in our lives, and still not discover our place on the ruler.

Some would choose to ignore the unmeasurable (helloooooooooo, conservatives!) If it can't be measured, it doesn't matter. There is no meaning unless we can study, allocate and quantify precisely the effort we need to expend in order to feel comfortable with that unmeasurable. I'd bet that many marriages and relationships fail under the delusion that somehow a husband or wife need only put in de minimis effort and get a satisfactory return.

It is this same pointed choice to ignore the unmeasurable that we fail to act in a timely fashion on a whole raft of problems, from global climate change to foreign relations to the decline of the electric grid, and we chastise those who can logically put two diverse facts together to come to a conclusion that is not readily apparent or immediately measurable.

Jimmy Carter, for example, is reviled by the right as the worst president of the 20th century (on a technicality, it's possible: George Bush the Junior did not serve until the 21st). Yet the man had vision. As an example, he foresaw out of the OPEC crises that America would need a more permanent solution to its energy problems and tried to shift the focus from cheaper oil to learning to live with more expensive oil while working on the technology necessary to solve a vexing problem. He created the Departments of Education and Energy (funny how conservatives howl about the one but embrace the latter). He gave the Panama Canal back to Panama, thus stifling American imperialism in Latin and Central America, and opened the door for democracy in South America.

And now, South America is emerging as a world power in its own right.

All of these looked at the time like bad decisions made by a weak president, but how much would you give to go back to 1977 armed with video of $3-a-gallon gasoline, at a time when it retailed for 35 cents a gallon?

We only act when there is demonstrable damage to be done to an objective measurement. This is why so often the arguments for a policy come down to the economic cost/benefit analysis. Those arguments get your attention, when you can show that investing a dollar now can save you a buck three-eighty next year. This is why it took a blackout in 2003 to even start a dailogue about the electric grid. and why it took an attack on the World Trade Center to get us to pay real attention as a people to the plight of the Muslim world and our role in it.

Ironically, that economic argument may get your attention but it never wins the argument. Usually, the unmeasurables win the argument.

Think about it: Health care ought to be an inalienable right for every American. It's part of that whole delectable intangible in the Declaration I alluded to earlier, the inalienable right of life. Yet the arguments now and have for a while focused on the cost of the program.

Can you measure a life's value? Can you measure the value of good health in leading a productive, happy life? How much freer are we for having good health? I'd argue a lot. Does society have a duty to look after all its people? Does your health affect mine?

Those are winning arguments in any civilized society, it seems to me. Right now, we're not at that stage, but once we get there, we will have healthcare for Americans, of Americans, and by Americans.

We just have to wait.

How long?

How are you measuring time? 

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

Polling and public policy: DADT

By R.K. Barry

There are many things about politics that are really annoying. One of them, as I have previously noted, is the tendency of political parties just coming off of significant electoral success to suggest that they have a mandate to implement every last one of their platform planks. You know, the American people have spoken, blah, blah, blah, and everything we - the newly elected majority - want to do has been sanctioned.

This is a given. We know. But with the accuracy of polling being what it is, it becomes increasingly hard to make statements of this kind that are so clearly inconsistent with what the American people appear to be saying at any given moment.

Such was the case recently when Arizona Senator John McCain blasted the Senate as it moved to repeal "don't-ask-don't-tell (DADT)," which would enable gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military.

Of those who would repeal DADT, McCain said the following:

"So here we are about six weeks after an election that repudiated the agenda of the other side," [and those who would repeal don't-ask-don't-tell] are acting in direct repudiation of the message of the American people."

Well, no. According to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, nearly eight in ten Americans favour gays and lesbians serving openly. Significantly, this cuts across partisan and ideological lines, with majorities of Democrats, Republicans, independents, liberals, conservatives and white evangelical Protestants in favor of homosexuals' serving openly.

The question is, what do we make of all of this? McCain can read polling numbers as well of the rest of us so he understands that on this issue the tide has turned and that his view is in the minority. But in a certain sense this goes back to an old political debate between the idea of instructed political representation versus representation, which, once elected, believes that it owes those who have voted them in only their best judgement. (Check out Edmund Burke on this.)

Those who would argue that they owe the electorate only their best judgement typically suggest that issues, taken one at a time, are far too complicated for the average voter to comprehend (even if they would never say that publicly). To run the government by taking the pulse of the nation on any given initiative would surely, they argue, lead to chaos. Government by referenda never works, only those who represent the people know how it all needs to hang together.

On this view, the voters, in the last election rejected something called "the left" and embraced a competing view coming from the right. Challenging the repeal of DADT is, for many conservatives, the kind of stance that defines this newly embraced conservatism - the polls of the moment be damned. Republicans who are off side, previously supportive voters - they just don't get it, or so the argument would go.

The problem is that it is not that simple. And when you govern in a way that indicates that you are only responsible to the electorate on voting day, you really start to piss off a lot of people who don't identify particularly strongly with the left or right, the so-called "swing voters" or independents.

I am simply saying that in an era when we poll everything, it's that much harder to govern. Sometimes polling numbers are so strong in one direction or another that we ignore them at our peril. Sometimes polling numbers are driven by effective mis-information campaigns and have to be taken with a grain of salt. Sometimes poling numbers indicate a strongly held view that a government would do well to ignore such as attitudes among white soldiers in the late 1940s opposing racial integration of the armed forces just before Truman did exactly that.

Politicians who trail in opinion surveys going into an election like to say that the only poll that counts is the one on election day. If that was ever true, it no longer is.

But how to use polling information in the construction of good public policy does remain a thorny issue. How to respect the views of the electorate on any particular issue while knowing that governments have to balance countless programs and initiatives, that's hard work. And then there is just the need to do what's right.

Polling: Can't live by it, can't live without it.

(Cross-posted to Lippmann's Ghost.)