I received a minor bit of castigation from Bob Fertik regarding the piece I wrote on the Pew poll and the public's acceptance of Bush's warrant-free wiretapping. (Scroll down.) I wrote: "Much of the public also believes that the wiretapping scandal is no scandal at all."
Not so, says Mr. Fertik. And he has numbers which, he claims, prove his point.
Zogby, it seems, has conducted another poll on this question: "If President Bush wiretapped American citizens without the approval of a judge, do you agree or disagree that Congress should consider holding him accountable through impeachment?" A 52% majority answered "yes"; 43% said "no."
This is the poll Fertik likes -- and it would seem to conflict with the Pew results, which recorded a 51% approval of Bush's actions. What accounts for the disparity in results? Is there a disparity?
Granted, some of the conflict may be due to methodology. But the real issue is one of wording.
The Pew question comes down to this: "Do you agree with what Bush did?" Quite a few of the people who approve of Bush's actions are under the impression that he functioned within the law. As I wrote in my earlier piece, folks in this category are probably beyond the reach of reasonable debate -- if they haven't yet been informed of what really occurred, they will probably never get the news.
The Zogby question is very different, because it is based on an "if-then" formulation: "IF Bush broke the wiretapping law, THEN should he be impeached?" I'm not shocked to learn that a majority answered yes. I'm more shocked to learn that a whopping 43% of the populace believes that Bush should be above the law even if he has behaved criminally.
I raised the same objections back when my fellow progressives were crowing about another poll, in which a majority expressed a desire to see Bush impeached IF he lied us into war. When a later poll asked the impeachment question without the "if" qualifier, the number of people supporting impeachment dropped sharply.
Let's look at the matter objectively. Let's remove politics from the equation. Presume that a pollster asks: "If Mr. X broke the law, do you think he should be punished?" Now presume that a pollster asks a simpler question: "Do you think Mr. X should be punished?" Common sense tells you that the first question will always find a higher level of agreement, no matter who X is or what he did.
Bob Fertik deserves enormous respect and admiration, so I hope he won't take these words incorrectly. But I would advise readers not to give much weight to "if-then" poll questions. And -- sadly -- I see no reason to revise my original statement.
3 comments:
hm. joe, with all due respect, i have to disagree with your conclusion here.
though i have no experience with polling, i do have some familiarity with the development of questionnaires and the stats that govern their validity and reliability.
the biggest problem that developers of such questionnaires have is that they are not careful enough to specify clearly the question at hand; equivocal questions yield equivocal results.
i read fertik's piece and agreed with him that the questionable polling results are the ones that don't specify the parameters of the question, such as pew's. so asking (a sample of) the american public a question that is not perfectly clear, that leaves room for interpretation - or misinterpretation - will not yield clear results. equivocal in, equivocal out, to thoroughly mangle that little axiom.
by my reading of fertik (scanned, admittedly), he was right to point out that the only valid poll on this issue would ask the true situational question. IF the president did this spying without judicial oversight (a crime), should he THEN be impeached? this is the only framing of the question that gets all the slop out of the system, so to speak.
ergo, the numbers from this zogby poll (whose work i believe to be about the best in the field) are, to my mind, the MOST trustworthy on this issue.
with all due respect.
To: lll
The general public cares more about Angelina Jolie's pregnancy than their constitutional rights; Bush's problem is going to come from the courts, since what he is claiming is that he feels that he's within his rights to go over their head.
The courts and legal scholars are giving a collective "Nuh-uh" over this claim, since this would reduce their power significantly.
Consider the resignation of U.S. District Judge James Robertson as the opening shot.
paul v, i'm not sure i agree that the american public is more enthralled with the brangelica baby, but the press sure is. that being said, i also agree, or at least hope, that these issues will be played out in the courts, where public opinion should not matter when it comes to the question of the law.
all THAT being said, i still hold to my point that joe was in error to assert that the if-then question was not the most revealing of public opinion on the domestic spying issue. i was not speaking to anything else in my comment, and neither was joe, really.
i suspect i speak for joe in agreeing with your points, but they're not at issue here.
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