America is a country with democracy fever. While our democracy is not the most honest (in fact, it's among the first world's most corrupt), it is at least the most popular. While this doesn't always translate to direct participation, it does result in a sort of unique democratic spirit. While everyone thinks, at some time, of their neighbors' opinions on them and other subjects, as Americans we are encouraged to do this constantly. It's simply how our country works. Thanks to this mindset, we have become a society utterly inundated with polls. And at times, I feel almost as if I'm drowning in them.

When it comes to opinions (factual polls are another matter entirely), there are really three kinds of surveys: observational polls, rhetorical polls, and push-polls. Each has its own unique purpose and methods, and each can be found on a regular basis in any year containing an election. An observational poll is a poll designed to measure the strength of some kind of opinion, and is ideally the simplest, least biased, and most vigorously honest sort of poll there is. Its only purpose is to determine how many people believe in X or Y, or don't believe in X or Y, or what have you. A scientifically-conducted poll asking whether or not you support affirmative action would be an example of this. Rhetorical polls, on the other hand, represent an attempt to prove something using a poll. The questions in rhetorical polls are, in some cases, semi-factual -- the most common are polls used to prove the ignorance of any particular group (including the general public). An example of this is a poll conducted in mid-2004 whose results stated most self-described Republicans believed there to be a direct link betwee Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. These polls are often conducted by unscientific means -- weeding out respondents likely to ruin the point the pollster is trying to make -- and, again, are definitionally biased.
Then there are push polls, which are a form of propaganda. The push poll was first used on a large scale by Karl Rove, perennial George W. Bush lackey and neoconservative mastermind; an example of this is a 2000 poll before Republican primaries in Southern states asking: 'If you believed John McCain fathered an illegitimate child by a black woman, would you be more or less likely to vote for him?' The idea is not to collect data, but rather to push an opinion which, while not a statement of fact (and often not factual at all), will critically bias the voter. This sort of poll is all too likely to become a crucial part of the political landscape in coming years, among other examples of shameless con-artistry.

Of these three polls, the first sort -- observational polls -- are at the same time the most valid and the least common. The other two are mainly political weapons and not much else. The problem with America today lies in exactly that -- while there's nothing directly offensive about the idea of polls being as important as they are, it is directly offensive that they have become not a tool to gauge the spirit of the country but, rather, a weapon for politicians to beat one another about the head with without doing anything constructive. 43% of statistics are made up on the spot anyway; it seems as if no one in the halls of power truly cares about what democracy is supposed to represent, and those who rule or wish to rule the country prefer to resort to abusive trickery to get ahead. That is something that has come of being a society inundated in polls. When the first concern is not representing what the people want but making the people want what you represent, it seems that it is difficult to care about the will of the people at all unless it aids in rhetoric.

The 2004 elections were influenced to a great extent by polls and, by extension, the media machine as a whole; in fact, 2004 marks the first time that the media have made a more clear and present impact on political socialization than either family or peers. Throughout 2004, issues which would play a crucial role in the elections were hit hard by the news and the media. The biggest issues -- specifically, gay marriage and the Iraq war -- were covered almost unrelentingly; it seems to be little coincidence that the issues which, by and large, helped the Bush campaign succeed were the ones with which the media seemed to be almost completely obsessed. The economy -- certainly more of a 'friends' or 'family' issue, as a great number of people lost jobs or know people who lost jobs due to outsourcing or economic decline -- was a much smaller issue in the election than either, and it was the Democratic campaign's single greatest plank. Compared to the much less domestically pressing problems of whom other people are legally allowed to marry and an endless war of occupation in the Middle East, economic issues received a disproportionately smaller and lower-impact amount of coverage from the media than either of those. We have been trusting the media to keep neutral for too long, because more and more, they seem to have an agenda to push... one which encourages big flashy wars and absurdly impractical tax breaks.

In 2004, one of many methods popular with those who would be our puppeteers is abusive manipulation of polls. They seem to reflect popular opinion at a glance, even though it is often true that the order of possible responses in a question can have more impact than the question itself on the results of a poll. An explosion of polls can usually be found when there is an opening or a weakness in a politician's campaign which would be reflected at all in an opinion poll; through such a method, a news service can try and harm a political candidate's chances by nationally declaring that the American people consider him hopeless. Our respect for democracy -- the idea that the bigger mass of people rule regardless of circumstances -- is such that we take this as a sign and are actually more likely to vote against said candidate. And people who didn't have any particular preference for either candidate are more likely to vote against the 'weak' one. It seems as if those hwo are writing the news have no problem reducing democracy into a popularity contest, so long as they control who is popular.

Generally, I've always had a problem with the left wing. I consider them, by and large, shortsighted and reactive; there is a trend in this country to simply treat opposition of a conservative idea as liberal and move on. The problem I see is that the Democrats are, more and more, setting themselves up as a permanent opposition party. The 2004 election saw this kind of thinking, along with an attempt to recreate 1992 (which we will return to later in this paper), greatly bolstering the Bush campaign. Generally, people are not going to vote for critics unless they have an intense problem with whoever they're criticizing. Simple criticism, such as the Kerry campaign seemed to be based on for much of the early race, just polarizes people; it makes some angry and it makes some think, but it won't draw support away from a candidate. In fact, this time around, it seems to have resulted in more support for Bush than would otherwise have been present. There was that and the fact that the media were more obsessed with who threw what at a protest or who did or didn't derelict his duties as a National Guardsman thirty years ago than what the candidates were promising to do now -- in fact, it was not until the debates that the media machine actually stopped doing their even best to turn the entire election into a battle of scandals and actually covered the issues: gay marriage and Iraq. The economy was not a news issue. Unemployment and outsourcing were not news issues. It irritates me to some degree that John Kerry was treated so very unfairly this election, and it more than irritates me that George Bush will represent America for the next four years. But unfortunately, that's all I could motivate myself to get after November Second -- irritated. I'm glad that I'm only a Democrat on election years -- that way I can at least spend half of my life believing aloud in the right thing, rather than being forced to support and try to uphold a candidate whose election is necessary to prevent a neanderthal from running the country. I mentioned earlier that the Democrats tried to recreate 1992 in 2004, and I earnestly believe that, unless stopped, they'll try to do the same thing in 2008.

1992 was a nightmare for the Republicans. Bush I was gruff and unsympathetic, and there was a recession on thanks to his policies and those of his predecessor. Any competent candidate could have beaten him -- and along came Clinton. Clinton was charismatic, Clinton was assertive, Clinton was in touch with the American people -- and, coincidentally, Clinton was to the clear right of every Democratic contender since Carter. It boggles the mind that analysts of the fateful 1992 election still seem to believe that Clinton managed to take votes from any conservative base because of his relative conservatism, but that seems to be common practice. And now, every 4 years, the Democrats, like a bunch of blue-suited Civil War re-enactors -- only fighting actual opponents with actual weapons who might as well be Confederates -- try to fight 1992 again, and lose. It happened in 2000 and it happened in 2004; George Bush might have driven this country into the ground, but so far he has been very charismatic, and so has easily defeated the timid but admirably moderate candidates the Democrats have fielded. The media machine played into a fear that seemed to be lodged into the collective consciousness of the Democrats, with no particular basis in reality -- that it is possible to make the American people angry through too much enthusiasm for the right thing, that there's some kind of political shame in being honest and opinionated, and so on. Howard Dean's defeat in the primaries is a clear example of this; political commentators who had no particular interest in the Democrats winning the Presidency and who would spend the rest of 2004 panning John Kerry anyway charged continuously that Howard Dean was 'unelectable' for no sound reason. In 2004, the youth vote represented those who had the most to lose by voting for Bush, and the Democrats chose a candidate who alienated them.

If Clintonitis is not shaken, and very soon, the center-right crowd that is trying to take over the Democratic Party might actually manage to succeed in an election by sheer dumb luck, and we get to look forward to the Democratic Party standing for what is politically expedient instead of morally and factually correct for the next few generations. It's the common problem of politicians and pollsters: they rely too much on the idea of a boolean. They are used to yes-or-no answers, and they can't grasp the fact that some people may or may not vote for a candidate. They have created a world of black and white, and try to live in that world whenever possible. From "I feel your pain" to digs about flip-flopping and 'unelectability', it seems that for my entire lifetime the political process has become a game in which winning is not everything, but the only thing. A look back at history always leaves me feeling cheated somehow, and I doubt I'm alone in feeling that way.