Polling the hell out of America

“I wasn’t elected just to do what’s popular. I was elected to do what was right”. So says president Obama, laughing at the scribes and the pundits, when asked about why he pursues policies that don’t poll well. Almost every day there’s some poll or public research on the job Obama has been doing, and many of them show the president’s numbers are in decline and his policy positions are difficult to sell. According to some polls, Americans have already decided against a second Obama term in 2012, although there still remains much time for recovery, even with the economy that shows signs of further weakening and with war losses growing. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs recently said that the president’s camp is worrying more about the people that they’re trying to help, and not so much about polls – basically, he said, “they are way too busy to sit around looking and worrying about polls”.

That may very well be true, and Gibbs & Co are perhaps right to mock the polling-obsessed media culture that is sometimes really ridiculous. But if they are too busy to look at polls, they certainly aren’t too poor to pay for them. While they routinely chide members of the press for obsessing about the day-to-day temperamental swings of the American public, behind the scenes the White House has poured plenty of money into conducting its own public opinion polls. The fact is that the Obama administration spends more on polls than Bush did: in the first 18 months in office, it has spent at least $4.45 million on the services of seven different pollsters, according to recently published records compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. That’s a lot of money for someone who “doesn’t worry so much about polls”, considering that during the first 24 months of the Bush administration, $3.1 million was spent on same purpose. The inconvenient truth is that Obama’s camp is polling the hell out the nation, at times outmatching even the notoriously poll-driven Clinton administration…

The expenditures seem at odds with the image that the administration and the president project publicly. During the past few months, Gibbs has repeatedly dismissed speculation that polling played a role in the federal government’s decision to file a lawsuit against the Arizona immigration law, the president’s economic agenda, and the approach to health care reform. But – if you just look at these numbers – it seems very clear that the administration is far more invested and interested in the flow of public opinion than it lets on. After all, it would be foolish to believe Obama and his associates are operating off pure conviction, wouldn’t it?