Editorial 6.9, September 2004, by Deirdre Helfferich Choices The phone rang the other day, and it was—surprise! a pollster. I’ve been polled more often this election season than ever before. I must have gotten onto somebody’s list. Hey, this one’s got opinions, let’s call her! Bleah. This pollster was, I suspect, calling from the Knowles campaign, but it was hard to tell. There weren’t any have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife-lately type questions, but my choices of response were limited. One particularly good example of this was the question, “What is the most important issue that your senator will be dealing with: natural resource development, jobs and the economy, the war in Iraq, education, or health care?” My most important issues weren’t even on the list. Natural resource development? Did that include wind or sunshine? They didn’t mention climate change and the environment, nor voting and election reform. Nor was corporate influence on government anywhere on that list. My response was, “They’re all interrelated. How can I choose one over the other?” The pollster wanted to put me down as “undecided,” but I told him never mind, and chose education, since the aware citizen is the only one who can really deal with all the important issues, whether on the list or not. Still, I expect that my choice won’t be seen as anything more than a piddling specific about teachers’ salaries or the No Child Left Behind Act, rather than a profound concern about the mental state of the American public, the undermining of public schools and the warping of education by the religious right, and the insidious influences of commercial television, infotainment in place of news reporting, and the power of media conglomerates. Nah. Too complicated. The poll questions I’ve been getting are rather like the political climate: superficially simplified, but a seething complex of unresolved issues and relationships underneath. They are also often designed to elicit a particular answer, so that the poll will reflect a particular kind of opinion, and thus whoever has hired the polling firm can say, “See? I told you so!” in support of whatever their opinion is. The polls I’ve been participating in are not well-crafted, neutral, information-seeking polls. It’s quite clear that the people hiring these pollsters don’t really want to know my view on the world, they just want me to voice a specific opinion, and if they have to trick me into doing that, they will. Sometimes, as above, they are more subtle about it, and sometimes, as in an automated poll of which I was the victim, it’s pretty heavy-handed. That poll was clearly the spawn of Republicans: one question could not be answered with a “no” without implying that the respondent was in favor of terrorism and the downfall of the country to al-Qaeda, but couldn’t be answered with a “yes” without implying that she thought George W. Bush was the best president we’ve ever had. It was only to be answered with a yes or a no. Given these two unpleasant choices, I answered no, and so am undoubtedly on an FBI watch list somewhere, as a terrorist sympathizer. Earlier on in the year, I was polled by a company operating out of Anchorage. This was a genuine poll: No trick questions. But most of the polls and questionnaires I have received aren’t like this. Don Young, for example, regularly sends blatantly slanted questionnaires to his constituency; I learned years ago not to bother filling them out, since he clearly didn’t want to know what I thought. So why are the candidates going to the terrific expense of hiring all these pollsters, just so they can get an opinion that is skewed by the questions they are asking in the first place? Why bother? Why not just lie, cheat, and steal in order to get into office? Well, in a word, legitimacy. Legitimacy still counts for something, at least, the veneer of it does. It is still important to candidates for public office to appear at least superficially to represent the people. So some of them hire unethical pollsters who are willing to contrive a set of questions that will force the respondents to give them the answers they want to have, so the candidate can claim that he or she is merely reflecting the will of the people. But it takes a little effort to prevent them from getting away with it. It takes pointing it out, in a public forum such as a letter to the editor, or in a more private one, say, by calling up the candidate’s campaign, or the polling company, and registering a complaint. It also means voting for the honest candidate—and they are out there, hardworking, honest men and women, like David Guttenberg, for example. Anybody remember the last statewide election we had? How so many candidates who were bandying wild, unrealistic promises got elected? And then, behold, there they were, people like Frank Murkowski, who told us there would be no new taxes and that our Permanent Dividend was safe if we elected him, suddenly levying fees left and right and trying to raid the Permanent Fund. I know quite a few disgruntled voters who took to referring to Governor Frank as Murtaxki. That election was a good example of the voters not paying attention to whether they were electing liars or honest people, people who would be willing to tell voters what they did not want to hear—because it was the truth. Yet, I hear people justifying voting for candidates they know are dishonest, who have demonstrably broken campaign promises, who have misled the public throughout their terms of office. And why would anyone support a liar? Well, these cynics view all politicians as liars and cheats, and claim it is only realistic to expect dishonesty. So of course, if all politicians are untrustworthy, then you want to vote for the one who gets results, and hope you get something out of it. This view is not realism, it’s laziness. It is appalling to me that people are perfectly willing to accept blatant lies from their elected representatives because “that’s what politicians do.” They can only do it if we let them. So now we have another election, and another chance to choose honest men and women, people who actually want to hear what we have to say, and will tell us the truth, even if it’s an uncomfortable one. We can decide that we really do want to stand on our values, and that we want our politicians beholden to those same values, and vote accordingly. Or we can be lazy, and decide that it doesn’t really matter if we’ve been lied to, or had our words twisted. But if we do this, then dishonesty and double-dealing and bribery and kickbacks and all the rest of the ills one can find in government—they will continue, and grow, and all this will be our responsibility, our fault. Do we really want that? | ||
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