Standoff, page 2
Knowing the Times
You can’t talk about public opinion for long without using the word fickle. Former British prime minister Harold Wilson once said, “A week is a long time in politics.” Look at how quickly public opinion turned against Bill Clinton after he took office in 1993. And how quickly he recovered after the shattering setback of the 1994 midterm election.
An Oxford University student once wrote a letter to British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli asking him what he should know to prepare for a career in public life. “Young man, there are only two things you must know to succeed in public life,” the politician responded. “You must know yourself. And you must know the times.”
Knowing the times is a challenge. What was true yesterday may not be true tomorrow. In 2006 the war in Iraq was the all-consuming issue that drove American politics. By 2008, Iraq had nearly disappeared from the political agenda, despite the fact that more than 180,000 US troops were still deployed in Iraq—some 44,000 more than in 2006.
If you understand public opinion—not just polls, but public opinion—you can solve many mysteries about American politics. Like how John McCain won the Republican nomination in 2008. (It was a personal vote.) And how he lost the general election. (It was an issues vote.) And how a candidate can win an election and still look like a loser (by having fared “worse than expected”).
And what happened to the so-called Bradley Effect, where white voters tell poll takers they will vote for an African American candidate and then don’t do it. I covered the 1982 race when Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley narrowly lost the election for California governor that he was expected to win. The polls were more reliable when Barack Obama ran for president in 2008. There are still racist voters out there, but they don’t lie about it as much as they used to.
I am not usually surprised by the direction public opinion takes, but sometimes the logic of public thinking escapes me.
One of those times was in the recount following the disputed 2000 presidential election. A week before Election Day, I had written, “If Gore became president after more people vote for Bush, the electoral college will be history.” The premise turned out to be backward. George W. Bush became president despite more people having voted for Al Gore.
The electoral college did not become history. There was no wave of public outrage over an “undemocratic” electoral system. People did complain loudly about the unfair outcome of the presidential election. By and large, however, the electoral college was not the principal complaint. Why not?
Some reporting and a careful reading of the polls revealed the answer: Florida. For five weeks after Election Day, the media focus stayed on Florida. Public anger was directed at the state’s chaotic voting procedures, not at the electoral college. The final count showed Gore winning the national popular vote by a substantial margin: nearly 540,000 votes. But the figure most Americans complained about was Bush’s disputed margin in Florida: 537 votes.
What if Bush had won the popular vote and lost the electoral college? Then the situation might have been different. Outraged Republicans would have called Gore an illegitimate president. Republicans, who were desperate to win after eight years of Bill Clinton, would probably have balked at Gore’s becoming president because of a “quirk in the rules.” If Gore had become president after more people had voted for Bush, chances are the electoral college would be gone. And Hillary Clinton would have beaten Donald Trump in 2016.
Some political mysteries are difficult to explain. Like why liberals can’t do talk radio. Liberals prefer satire such as Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Saturday Night Live. You could argue that liberal talk radio is NPR, with its flagship show All Things Considered. Conservative firebrands don’t consider all things. They consider what they damn well want to consider.
And why, if Hollywood is a nest of liberals and Democrats, have so many Hollywood celebrities who’ve run for political office been Republicans (Ronald Reagan, George Murphy, Fred Thompson, Sonny Bono, Fred Grandy, Clint Eastwood, Arnold Schwarzenegger)?
An observer of public opinion has to distinguish between public attitudes that are resistant to change, such as the American public’s distrust of government; views that shift over time, such as opinions on racial segregation and same-sex marriage; and opinions that can turn in a moment.
My initial experience of live television news coverage came during Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas in 1991. Until Anita Hill gave her testimony, men regarded sexual harassment as something of a joke. They thought of it as “flirting.” They failed to comprehend women’s anger and humiliation. Professor Hill’s testimony about her degrading experiences turned out to be one of those rare moments when public consciousness changed, transforming sexual harassment from a joke to a crime.
I grew up in the segregated South, where I witnessed firsthand the transformation of a society. In 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama, her action released the pent-up anger and frustration of millions. Southern whites, who had allowed themselves to believe that segregation worked, suddenly saw how outraged black people were to live under Jim Crow laws. Consciousness changed. And eventually a social order was overturned.
I was teaching at Harvard University during the student strike of 1969. At first, most students saw the antiwar protesters as crazy radicals acting out. Then in the early morning of April 10, university authorities called in the police to remove students occupying the administration building. The resulting bloody confrontation roused student consciousness. What had been something of a joke on April 9 turned into a deadly serious cause on April 11. I could see it in my classes: career-minded students were transformed overnight into political activists.
When Matthew Shepard was brutally beaten, tortured, and left to die tied to a fence post in 1998, the public began to understand the violence and hatred gay people face. Previously, many Americans saw gay rights as a solution for which there was no known problem. But consciousness changed. Now same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry.
All Politics Is National
Presidential elections are the markers the United States uses to define itself every four years. President and vice president are the only elected officeholders whose constituency is the entire country.
It may have been the case long ago that presidential elections involved separate campaigns for each state’s electoral votes, as the authors of the Constitution intended. But especially since the rise of television coverage in the 1960s, presidential campaigns have become nationalized. National swings toward one party or the other are the rule, with smaller local variations. Congressional and state elections are also becoming more nationalized. The 2006 midterm election was a nationwide referendum on the war in Iraq. The 2014 midterm was the “Nobama election.”
The issues and alignments that define American politics tend to appear first at the national level. State and local elections often take awhile to catch up to national trends because voters feel personal attachments to state and local candidates, even if they are in a different party. House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill Jr.’s famous dictum “All politics is local” is outdated. Today presidential elections lead; state and local elections follow.
White southern voters driven by racial backlash started abandoning the Democratic Party in presidential elections in the 1960s. It took decades for white southerners to acquire the habit of voting Republican in state and local elections. A lot of southern Democrats held on to their seats in Congress through the 1970s and 1980s because of deeply entrenched personal and local loyalties. But then many of those Democrats suddenly got swept away in the 1994 midterm election, which became a negative referendum on President Bill Clinton. Popular Texas representative Jack Brooks, for example, had served in Congress for forty-two years. The Democrat lost his seat in 1994 because of his support for Clinton.
The Power of Public Opinion
It is a core popular belief that ordinary people don’t have any power. Time and time again, however, I have seen public opinion prevail over the political elite. I saw it in the Elian Gonzalez case in 2000. The American public saw the story as a terrible human tragedy that politicians were trying to exploit for political advantage. The polls sent out a strong signal: anyone who tried to politicize the issue would pay a price. Public opinion thwarted efforts by conservatives to keep the child, who had survived a shipwreck and lost his mother, in the United States as a political refugee.
Public opinion prevailed again in the Terri Schiavo case in 2005. Americans saw this story, too, as a personal tragedy that politicians were trying to exploit for political gain. Once again, the polls sent a powerful signal that politicians should not interfere. Public opinion thwarted efforts by conservatives to keep Ms. Schiavo, who had been in a persistent vegetative state for fifteen years, on life support. In a Gallup poll, three-quarters of Americans disapproved of Congress’s involvement in a private family matter.3 But the Republican-led Congress did interfere. And Republicans paid a price in the next election.
In January 1998, shortly after the Monica Lewinsky story broke, I received a late-night telephone call from Barbra Streisand, a well-known Clinton supporter. She asked me whether I believed President Clinton could survive the scandal.
Washington insiders were declaring the Clinton presidency over. The president’s fellow Democrats weren’t rushing to his defense. They felt betrayed. At CNN, we had trouble finding Democrats who would go on the air to defend Clinton. The public’s response was shock and dismay. Pundits started talking about how Clinton’s days were numbered, what Al Gore would do as president, and whom he would choose as his vice president. (The consensus in the chattering class was that he would pick Senator Dianne Feinstein of California.)
I told Ms. Streisand that I seriously doubted the president could survive. He was a married man accused of having a sexual relationship with a woman less than half his age. Lewinsky was a White House intern and therefore someone under the president’s supervision. And the sexual encounters had occurred in the Oval Office.
“I don’t know,” Ms. Streisand replied. “I think he can get through this. After all, it’s just about sex. People make allowances when it’s just about sex.” The House of Representatives impeached Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice. But the core of the matter was sex.
The polls saved Clinton—literally. There were no public demonstrations in support of the president. No rallies. No phone banks. Just the polls, which astonished Washington and the world when they showed the president’s public support rising. Conventional wisdom shifted 180 degrees. Congressional Democrats rallied to defend the president—once they saw whose side the public was on.
Bill Clinton knew and understood the American public better than any president since Ronald Reagan. He was just as skillful a communicator, too. How Bill Clinton survived impeachment remains one of the great feats of political dexterity in US history. His feel for public opinion played a key role. If there had been no polls, Clinton would have been finished. We will examine that amazing story of redemption in chapter 4.
Public opinion is often misunderstood. Its importance is typically either overestimated or underestimated. Overestimated because its importance seems obvious. The United States is a democracy. Of course public opinion matters. Politicians have to pay attention to it. At least they are supposed to. But do they? Politicians are frequently uncomprehending, or heedless, of public opinion. When that happens, there are painful consequences. Democrats failed to grasp the centrality of the terrorism issue in the 2002 and 2004 elections. Republicans refused to acknowledge the public’s opposition to the impeachment of President Clinton in 1998, until their election losses drove home the point.
The power of public opinion is also underestimated by the public. Since the 1960s, growing numbers of Americans have come to believe they don’t have much say in what the government does.4 Why not? Because distrust of elites is a core populist belief. Populism creates a wall of cynicism between “us” and “them,” the people and the political insiders. The people believe political leaders are hostile or indifferent to their concerns. Leaders often assume that the people are ignorant or passive or easy to manipulate.
Americans root for the underdog and stand up for the little guy. They vent their anger at insiders, big shots, experts, Washington, Wall Street—anyone in a position of power who is seen as disdainful of ordinary people or remote from their concerns. It’s the Howard Beale outcry from the 1976 movie Network, a satire of television news: “We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore!” No political figure embodied that view more than Donald Trump, who has the traits of a populist demagogue.
Ordinary Americans don’t believe they have much power. But they do. They have the power to stop wars (Vietnam and Iraq). They have the power to keep a president in office (Bill Clinton). They have the power to slash taxes (Proposition 13 in California). They have the power to defy the political establishment (Trump). They even have the power to stop themselves from reelecting the same people over and over again (popular referendums to impose term limits on elected officials).
To argue that the people rule is not to argue that government always does what the people want. Clearly it doesn’t. It is to argue that US political leaders are far more attentive to public opinion than most Americans suspect. And when leaders fail to act, or act in defiance of what the public wants, they pay a price.
I first grasped the power, and complexity, of public opinion in 1968 when, as a graduate student, I studied the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary. Antiwar candidate Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota nearly defeated incumbent president Lyndon Johnson in his own party. But there was another surprise: polls revealed that many Vietnam “hawks” voted for McCarthy, the “dove.” Why? Because they were furious with LBJ for the way the war was being conducted.
A little reporting revealed that a lot of New Hampshire voters could not be classified in the conventional Washington categories as either hawks or doves. They were both. What did they want the United States to do in Vietnam? “We should win or get out” was the answer I heard over and over again. It was perfectly rational for them to vote for McCarthy because that was the easiest way to send a message of dissatisfaction with LBJ’s war policy.5
Johnson got the message and withdrew from the race two weeks later. But the antiwar movement never quite grasped what had happened: the consensus in the country had become antiwar but not dovish. As a result, the McGovern campaign crashed and burned in 1972, and the war went on.
Not a lot has changed since 1968 in the way Americans think about military intervention. The public hates political wars. People believe the military should be used to win military victories, not to win the hearts and minds of foreigners. As a candidate for the White House in 2000, George W. Bush appeared to understand that lesson. He declared that the US military should never be used for “nation building.” But as commander in chief, that is exactly what he did in Iraq, and Republicans paid the price in the 2006 midterm. When President Bush responded by defying public opinion and sending more troops—the “surge” of 2007—he triggered an outpouring of public rage.
Public opinion polls are common in every democratic country. But they are far more pervasive in the United States. In other countries, polls assess the popularity of the government and its chances of survival in the next election. In the United States, polls assess the popularity of every policy and every politician. All the time.
The United States does not have a tradition of party government. When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, Democrats were in control of both the House and Senate. But the president was unable to hold his party together to pass health care reform. In America, you have to poll on every individual issue. Simply gauging public support for the president and the president’s party doesn’t tell you much about how an issue is likely to fare.
Question: If public opinion is such a powerful force, why is it that the majority often does not rule?
After the horrifying school shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012, when 20-year-old Adam Lanza killed 20 six- and seven-year-old schoolchildren and six adult staff members as well as his mother and himself, close to 90 percent of the public favored expanded background checks for gun purchasers. But the measure could not get through the US Senate. Likewise, polls show that a solid majority of Americans favors a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. But immigration reform with citizenship provisions has been impossible to get through Congress. The public has long favored a budget deal that balances spending cuts and tax increases. But balanced deals are difficult to pass. A majority of Americans support abortion rights, yet more and more abortion restrictions have been imposed.
The reason is that intensity of opinion matters, not just numbers. Politicians don’t just pay attention to how many people are on each side of an issue. They also need to know how much people on each side of the issue see it as an overriding priority. How many votes will be driven by those who feel one way or the other? An intensely committed minority—gun owners, for instance—can have a bigger impact than a casually committed majority for whom the issue does not determine their vote. I will take up the intensity factor in chapter 6. But it is not inconsistent with the idea of populism. Public opinion matters. Loud opinions matter more.
Coalitions and Movements
American political parties have always been coalitions: diverse interests that join together to pursue a shared objective. When I started covering politics, the dominant coalition was the Franklin D. Roosevelt coalition. That coalition reached its peak strength in President Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 landslide victory. It proceeded to fall apart during LBJ’s second term. FDR brought together a coalition of groups that had one thing in common: they all wanted something from the federal government. The Roosevelt coalition included working-class voters, first- and second-generation immigrants, African Americans, Jews, southern whites, labor unionists, seniors, and farmers.
