Polls, the President, and a Counterfactual

This article brings up some interesting points, but as they have been talking about some over at opinionjournal.com, I think this election season is revealing some real fundamental problems with polling. Namely, just asking a citizen if they are happy with the president's performance in Iraq is misleading if you do not also ask why. Most media types seem to assume that the low poll numbers reflect some kind of displeasure with the planning or occupation or lack of international support or whatever else John Kerry is shoveling. But I suspect the truth is that the increasing unhappiness with President Bush's efforts is because a lot of Americans do not think he is being decisive or belligerent enough. In fact, I would suspect that the pollsters are probably being lied to by a sizable number of Americans who strategically say they are satisfied with the president and the war because they understand the only alternative being offered is less action, which they certainly do not want. How do I know this? I've done it. Twice. And I'm not that smart or unique.

It is a crying shame that the Democrats allowed the far left antiwar branch of their party to hijack the nomination, so they can't offer a viable belligerent alternative. As a result of this strategic polling and voting by conservatives and moderate hawks and this Democratic misstep, President Bush is receiving little or no criticism from the more hawkish chunk of the population. With little or no opposition, the center of the discussion and debate has been dictated almost entirely by the antiwar left.

Imagine if Al Gore had won the 2000 election. Pretty much everyone agrees that he would have gone into Afghanistan. In the partisanship of the last few years, almost everyone says he would not have gone into Iraq--at least without UN approval and aid. But is that true? Think about where the political debate would be had Gore won. A Democratic president would have had to act as a war president, presumably with the backing of much of his party. That would have consigned the antiwar left to a much smaller role on the fringe of the debate. They obviously would not have found a home in a Republican party that almost certainly would have been all over President Gore for going too slow, worrying too much about international opinion and the Arab street, not having a large enough military to do the job, cutting the military and intelligence community during the Clinton administration and leaving us unprepared for war, etc. And the Republicans would have had the backing of a huge proportion of the American people who wanted to see te president doing more. Imagine the political pressure Gore would have had to face had he dragged his feet after Afghanistan. But even if he hadn't, and he had done everything exactly the same as George W. Bush, the Republicans would have been all over him for his weakness.

That would have been a better debate. That would have made the country safer. Americans would not be lying to pollsters because everyone would know what they meant when they said they were not happy with the president's performance in the war. And when John McCain won the presidential election in 2004 as an ultrahawk, the United States finally could have got to the business of winning the war on terror.

As it stands this election season, winning the war isn't even on the table.