I have mixed feelings about reporting on these kind of findings. On the one hand, I don't actually think that elected officials' future has very much to do with the public's opinion, such as it is, on this kind of question. I think, for example, that Obama's re-election prospects will be based much more on whether or not living standards are increasing in 2012 than on whether or not the policies he pursued in 2009 matched up with at-the-time public opinion. So the politically smart thing to do is more-or-less ignore year-one opinion and just do things that you think will work out in the medium-term (of course the wise and moral thing to do is to also think about the long term) irregardless of the polls. But on the other hand, there's lots of reason to believe that people's beliefs about short-term public opinion do influence how they act so it's important to spread the information around when it points in the right direction.
Editor's note: Grammarians prefer not to use irregardless, as it is a made-up word with the same meaning as regardless.
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