Michael Marshall, moderator: I’d like to move on now to our next speaker, Ben Wattenberg. Ben Wattenberg is currently a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute here in Washington, D.C., and he’s the moderator of the weekly PBS program, “Think Tank” with Ben Wattenberg. He cut his teeth in politics as an aide and speechwriter to President Johnson back in the late ’60s. He was an advisor to Senator Hubert Humphrey’s Senate race in 1970, and Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson’s run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972 and 1976. So he knows the political side of the equation.
He’s made a stellar reputation in a form of journalism that I value very highly, which is a form of journalism that really looks at issues that are not the sexy headline issues, but are important long-term concerns that are going to affect all of us and that aren’t going to catch the headline news on any given day, but it’s important for us to know about. He’s written a large number of books, including Values Matter Most, The Good News is the Bad News is Wrong, The Real America, and The Real Majority, which was considered the best-selling bible of the ’70 and ’72 elections. He’s also probably known to many of you as the host and the writer, the creator of a number of PBS television specials on issues concerning American politics, concerning fertility rates, and so on.
He’s currently working on the new demography, how depopulation will shape the future. And of most interest for our topic today, he worked on something called the first measured century, which included a PBS TV special and a reference book that looked at the impact on American life in the 20th century of social and economic data-gathering and the impact of it. So I think he’s absolutely a wonderful and appropriate person to have here for this panel. Please join me in welcoming Ben Wattenberg.
Ben Wattenberg: Mike, thank you very much. After the ridiculous fight after the 2000 election, which took Mr. Gore and now-President George W. Bush, where the fight went on for eight or nine weeks until they could figure out who really won, CNN appointed a commission that included three people, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist from San Francisco, James Richer (?), Joan Connor (?), who started a number of PBS programs and was an executive producer of the Bill Moyer’s show, and myself. And we held hearings and traveled around the country. The operative sentence of the report was this: “On Election Day 2000, television news organizations staged a collective drag-race on the crowded highway of democracy, recklessly endangering the electoral process, the political life of their country, and their own credibility.” This is from three people who work in journalism and work closely with polls.
My message here today, if I could sum it up, is it could happen again. The polling profession, which is one that I admire and I participated in and I’ve written about, is in very deep trouble. They don’t particularly want to note it, for obvious reasons, but just consider the three people who are now in play for the presidential nomination – Senators Clinton, Obama, and McCain. If anyone six weeks ago or two months ago told you where those candidates would be today, you would have been regarded as crazy, right? Obama was nobody, Clinton was way up high, and McCain was out of money and busted. Now McCain’s got the nomination and there is going to be what seems to be an acrimonious fight between Senator Clinton and Senator Obama, which to the glee of most Republicans may last until late August with the Democrats hammering each other.
Now there are reasons why the polling of recent decades, recent years particularly, has been this harsh. First of all, let me say, let’s consider the Iowa caucuses. Now they take only about 10 to 15 percent of the people vote. It’s snowy, it’s cold, it’s an almost all-white state. It takes five hours to cast your ballot. It is not a secret vote. You have to stand up and declare, and uncommitted almost always wins. And yet candidates have come out of the Iowa caucuses – Jimmy Carter sort of latched on to them, nobody had ever heard of him before – and got global headlines for winning this election that if we had that kind of election in Iraq today, people would say, my God, what sort of monster are we creating? It’s not secret, it takes five hours, and so on and so forth. And yet the media sets into motion this great media wave and it boosted Carter literally into the presidency. That’s in itself strange.
Now there are some specific general reasons why polling has lost so much of its potency. First is telemarketing. We all get these junk calls, often in the middle of the night, or almost in the middle of the night, unless you sign that little card – which I have never figured out quite how to do, and even then it doesn’t always work – and somebody tells you they’re from the firefighters or from the International Home for the Aged and they want money. So people are very leery, and people use, not only in politics but in commerce they use polling to sell a product or a candidate. They’re saying, well, what’s – would you use a soap brand A, or a soap brand B, if you thought that brand B really made your clothes dirtier? Then they will take the results. Everybody of course says brand A, and then they trumpet the results and sell it through the ad agencies and say, wow, look how much better brand A is than brand B. In an earlier day I could have told you the brand names but I can’t right now. So people do not want to answer the phone when pollsters call.
It used to be that pollsters went out door to door, and that was the whole idea of the Gallup organization. They went door to door. Two things. It was found to be too expensive, and secondly, not so much now but certainly 20 years ago pollsters would – enumerators who did the polling simply would not go into dangerous neighborhoods. So you had a whole vast section of the electorate that was uncounted and unaccounted for.
And then you have the exit polling, where people come out of the polls and they’re approached by professionals who say, could you tell us who you voted for? And it used to be that 90 percent or so said, sure, I voted for so and so, it’s anonymous. I think the rate is now about 30 percent, and often coupled with abuse, like, get out of here, it’s none of your business.
And then we have the advent of the absentee ballot and early voting. How do you poll those people? You don’t even have a phone number for them. So they work a vast mathematical model of calling people who they think would be like the people who are living in France or Israel or India who are Americans and were voting, and they set up a model and they say, well, this is how those people, we believe, would vote. There are enormous flaws.
Now there’s something else that should be noted about the two parties which have sort of turned off the American electorate, particularly in the Democratic Party. The common thing you hear from everybody is that the left wing of the Democratic Party controls the primaries and that’s why all the candidates campaign on the left. Yet every four years the New York Times aggregates all its polling from all the primary states, and what you find is that the Democrats who vote in primaries are not particularly liberal. They’re pretty close to – on attitudes about abortion, on race, on gun control, on foreign policy, you name it, they are not terribly different from the all-American averages. And yet the campaigners feel there is this left-wing veto and the rhetoric gets lefter and lefter and lefter and lefter.
We had a situation in 1988 and 1992 when Rev. Jackson ran for the presidency, and his rhetoric got lefter and lefter and lefter and lefter. There were probably 40 debates, and they said Gephardt was a flip-flop and Bill Bradley wasn’t telling the truth, and Al Gore – no one challenged Jesse Jackson, and he was saying some of the most outrageous things, vast cuts in the defense budget, his subalterns were soliciting funds from Muammar Ghadaffi. He saluted Castro. No one challenged him.
So the legacy of that phenomenon has left us with a situation that many Americans think that the Democratic Party has either gone over the edge or is afraid to challenge those who have. And to look at the election results, since 1964 the Democrats have received a majority of the popular vote only once. That was in 1976, with 50.1 percent of the vote that Jimmy Carter got. Not exactly a screaming majority. And at the same time you’ve had big wins, landslide wins by Ronald Reagan, earlier by Richard Nixon, solid wins by Bush the father and Bush the son. So the Democratic Party in my judgment is in very deep trouble because of this image that they are too far left.
I am writing a book now which is called Fighting Words: A tale of how liberals created neoconservativism. I am proud to call myself a neoconservative. I think the label has been poisoned by people who don’t have a clue as to what it means, and it recounts some of these things, and you’re all welcome to purchase it at your favorite bookstore.
Now I think if I may – I have about two minutes. I’ll take about 30 seconds just to say thank you, and I look forward to the colloquy that will take place. Thanks a lot.
Michael Marshall: Thank you very much indeed, Ben. Really drawing on your great depth of experience in American politics. I was very struck by the phrase from the report of the commission you were on, that American media has indulged in a collective drag race on the electoral highway of democracy with devastating results. That’s powerful language indeed. I think also you’ve left us with a question perhaps we can explore in the discussion period, which is, the relative roles of the media in general and its political reporting and of polling specifically.
With that thought in mind, let’s move on to our next speaker, who is going to give us I guess a practicing politician’s perspective of sometimes being the target of the media, the object of polling –
Ben Wattenberg: I’m a practicing politician also. I ran twice and lost twice for minor local office, and I decided it would be better to be a pundit than a politician.
SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY
Ben J. Wattenberg is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. He is the moderator of the weekly PBS television program Think Tank with Ben Wattenberg.
Wattenberg's current project is a book tentatively entitled The New Demography: How Depopulation Will Shape the Future. The book deals with dramatically falling fertility rates in both the rich and poor nations, and speculates on the geo-political, economic, commercial and cultural implications.
Wattenberg’s most recent major project was The First Measured Century, an effort to understand, explain and dramatize American life through the lens of social and economic data. It included a three-hour prime time PBS television special (Original Air Date: December 20, 2000) and a major reference book, entitled The First Measured Century: An Illustrated Guide to Trends in America 1900-2000 (AEI Press) co-authored with Theodore Caplow and Louis Hicks.
Wattenberg is the author of eight additional books, including Values Matter Most (1995), The First Universal Nation (1991), The Birth Dearth (1987), The Good News is the Bad News is Wrong (1984), The Real America, (1974) and co-author with Richard M. Scammon of The Real Majority (1970), considered the best-selling "bible" of the 1970 and 1972 elections, This U.S.A. (1965) and a novel Against All Enemies, co-authored with Ervin Duggan.
He has been the host-essayist for many PBS television specials, including Values Matter Most in 1996, The Grandchild Gap (concerning falling fertility rates), America's Number One, What Next?, The Stockholder Society, A Third Choice, which explores how third parties have shaped American politics and American life, The Democrats, and weekly PBS documentary series In Search of the Real America and Ben Wattenberg At Large.
Wattenberg was an aide and speech writer to President Lyndon B. Johnson from 1966 to 1968. He has served as an advisor to both Senator Hubert Humphrey's race for the Senate in 1970 and Senator Henry Jackson's contest for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972 and 1976, years when Mr. Wattenberg also helped write the Democratic National Platform.
Wattenberg was appointed by President Carter to serve on the Presidential Advisory Board for Ambassadorial Appointments, and as a public member of the American delegation to the Madrid Conference on Human Rights. In 1981, he was appointed by President Reagan to the Board of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, serving for ten years and becoming vice-chairman. In 1991 he was appointed by President Bush to the Task Force on U.S. Government International Broadcasting. In 1992, he was appointed by Speaker Thomas Foley to the Commission on Broadcasting to the People's Republic of China.
Ben J. Wattenberg graduated from Hobart College in 1955, and was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Hobart in 1975. He was born in 1933 in the Bronx, New York.