David Hill

Suppose that Barack Obama is a stock on the New York Stock Exchange. Do you buy, sell or hold? The book value of his stock, his job approval rating, hovers just above 50 percent these days and is in a long, slow slide. Unfortunately, approval ratings, like a stock’s book value, don’t tell the whole story. Other factors, from management to anticipated future earnings, figure into stock valuations. So how do we value the president?

Recently I handed some fresh poll results to a client. The next day I received an anguished reply by e-mail, expressing frustration and disappointment that several of the polled public’s opinions seemed inconsistent, even contradictory. This candidate was looking for logic to validate the poll and its results. If voters support issue A and also support issue B, then it should follow that they would support issue C. But they didn’t. And they don’t.

“Ball-watchers. They’re just a bunch of ball-watchers.” That’s the label coaches and former players use to label the typical couch-potato football fan. While most fans try to follow the ball on every play, the expert’s field of view widens to pay attention to defensive schemes, pulling linemen, downfield blocking and a host of other things nowhere near the ball. I wish most political pundits had a wider field of view. Instead, they are more like the typical football fan, focusing only on the ball.

The venerable Gallup Organization surprises us this week by digging deep into its enormous treasure trove of surveys to deliver a tantalizing analysis of trends in the ideologies of the electorate. I’m talking about Lydia Saad’s scrutiny of the surprising resilience of conservatism in America today.

As I write this column on Tuesday, I am keeping an eye on Apple’s stock. I’m a shareholder, you see, and proud that I held onto AAPL shares I own. My financial adviser suggested weeks ago that I sell off my Apple stock because share prices exceeded analysts’ targets, more than doubling what I paid last year.

We’re in the season where private polls for candidates and parties are testing the pretext for candidacies. Will you be more or less likely to vote for a candidate with decades of experience in government? Would you find a political newcomer attractive? How appealing is a candidate with a military background? A woman? There are dozens of vocational, regional and demographic identities that fit most candidates, and we need to know which ones are most appealing to voters when we do a candidate rollout.

One of the dark secrets of the polling trade is that our historical roots are deeply intertwined with the social psychology of propaganda. Many of the first opinion researchers were paid to understand how we could better motivate soldiers and citizens to sustain our efforts in wartime. 

It is now evident that the widely prophesized national partisan realignment is not going to happen. The election of Barack Obama did not cause a huge and permanent shift to the Democrat Party. Instead, it appears that the longer-term trend toward dealignment is still operant. Neither political party is making much headway, independent candidates are popping up at the state and local levels, and potential independent or third-party presidential candidate Ron Paul is up to something worth monitoring.

President Barack Obama’s recent speech to America’s schoolchildren broke a cardinal rule of politics: Don’t get your friends into trouble. Why didn’t the brain trust advising the president figure this out before they embroiled public school districts across America in an awkward political mess? My guess is they wrongly thought the speech and controversy surrounding it were of no significance.

The latest edition of The Chronicle Review (a magazine of the Chronicle of Higher Education) features an intriguing article, “Taking the Right Seriously.” The jumping-off point for this piece is the University of California’s announcement that it’s launching a Center for the Comparative Study of Right Wing Movements. The essay that follows, penned by Columbia University’s ideologically androgynous Mark Lilla, lauds Berkeley’s move in half-hearted fashion while urging that conservatism be approached as a genuine intellectual tradition rather than a social psychopathology.