Let me finish tonight with politicians. They say they don’t “pay attention to polls.” They do, of course. They not only pay attention, they “pay” for polls! It’s the first thing candidates do when they begin a campaign: they hire a first-rate pollster and find out what people are thinking.
Personally I love polls. I love knowing what my fellow Americans think. I doubt it affects my thinking. In fact, if you’ve watched me over the years you may have noticed I am “counter-popular.” The country was getting stirred against Saddam Hussein. What I was stirred against was the propaganda campaign out of the Bush White House and the neo-con front groups pushing the war on the op-ed pages.
I’ve listened to the storm against the President, listened to it even as I’ve sided with the basic assessment that if he hadn’t dealt, the Republicans would come riding into town next month cutting taxes for everybody after the Democrats led by Nancy Pelosi let them go up. That’s the reality I’ve been looking at through all this tempest, even as I’ve tried not to be critical of those angered by the cruddy reality that led to Obama’s decision to deal – the reality of a terribly anemic economy, a corporate leadership sitting on two trillion dollars that could be the biggest economic catalyst of all, and a Republican leadership in earnest to play the nastiest politics seen in the country in a long while, ready to kill the economic recovery rather than let Obama get a win.
The new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows Democrats show 63 percent of Democrats want their party leaders here to “make compromises” rather “stick to their positions. Twenty-nine percent want them to do “that.” Interesting, isn’t it. Could it be that, like in the case of King Solomon, the true mother said it was better to have the baby go to the other woman rather than be killed. Maybe, the best thing you can say about Democrats right now, even in this downbeat times, is that their values really are intact. They don’t want the country to suffer even if it means letting the other side get its way this time.
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