Lake Woebegone mortgages
04/14/2009
Americans largely support assistance to those facing foreclosure on their homes, but also display conspicuous signs of ambivalence. Several polls, asking the question in different ways, find support ranging from…
When polls go wrong
04/07/2009
Last week, my friend and distinguished sparring partner in these pages, David Hill, commented on the American Association of Public Opinion Research’s (AAPOR) report on what went wrong with the…
A GOP leadership this Dem likes
03/31/2009
By the time you’re reading this, either Democrats are crowing about winning a special election in a congressional district that voted twice for George Bush and where registered Republicans outnumber…
Hope is still alive
03/24/2009
George W. Bush was undone in the first instance by his misguided pursuit of a war the American people came to believe was a serious mistake, while the economy delivered…
Lessons from battle of basic cable
03/17/2009
Beyond the schadenfreude generated by their recent encounter, valuable lessons in public relations can be extracted from the battle between Jon Stewart (whom I watch religiously) and Jim Cramer (whom…
Tying Obama to Stalin egregious
03/10/2009
In 1938, Stalin’s secret police arrested my great-aunt, who was within weeks of being deported to Siberia, where she and her children would have been lost forever. Fortunately, her husband…
Lessons of stimulus polling
03/03/2009
Polling around the recently signed economic recovery bill affords an opportunity to tease out some lessons about public opinion:Partisanship Reigns (Or, Do Leaders Lead?) – Regular readers will not be…
Republican strategy didn’t work
02/24/2009
Leaderless, rudderless, bereft of a message or ideas and in defiance of common sense, Republicans continue to march into hell for a cause that is far from heavenly, diminishing further…
Bipartisan, post-partisan, just partisan
02/17/2009
Bipartisanship has been used to describe so many things, it now means almost nothing. If bipartisanship means soliciting ideas from the opposition party, President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)…
Kid-hater or a tax-lover
02/10/2009
Which is it? Does Sen. Susan Collins hate kids or love property taxes? I know we are supposed to be post-partisan, lavishing praise on Sen. Collins (Maine) for breaking ranks…