Polling to Govern: Public Opinion and Presidential Leadership (review)

Pollsters are the Rodney Dangerfields of the American political process; they get no respect. Americans demand perfection. Even minor errors loom large while successes are taken for granted. Americans seem annoyed when polls fail to predict the future. Moreover, despite polls' centrality to modern campaigning and governing, the stench of illegitimacy wafts around them, as if the act of divining public opinion in a democracy compromises a leader's integrity.

Heith deftly deploys various methods to assess how modern presidents use polling. Employing superb historical instincts and considerable research skills, she has produced a nuanced evaluation of "the permanent campaign," the seemingly constant presidential search for high approval ratings. Heith has mined the impressive resources available in various presidential libraries to see not only what polls revealed but how presidential aides applied that information. Transcending the often excessively compartmentalized disciplines, Heith has achieved an interdisciplinary coup, applying the theories and research methods of the political scientist to the historian's treasure trove of memoranda and letters available in the Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George Herbert Walker Bush collections.

Heith challenges the conventional wisdom that the modern White House's persistent polling reflects a compulsive search for approval. "In an age of continuous poll taking and mediocre leadership. . . ," she writes archly, "it seems rather ridiculous that political parties would spend millions of dollars annually on behalf of their president merely to provide a monitoring mechanism" (xiii). Heith suggests two correctives. First, she offers some balance. Yes, "campaign tools exist in the White House," she argues, but "the permanent campaign does not dominate decision making" (134). It is one of many arrows in the modern presidential quiver. Furthermore, polling is more than a presidential ego trip. Especially as the term progresses, presidents and their aides use polling for "agenda building and mapping through the legislative battles with Congress" (135).

Heith ranges widely, from Watergate to Monica-gate, from George Herbert Walker Bush's benign push to plant trees as the "environmental president" to George Bush's tougher War on Terror. Heith resists the temptation to exaggerate the centrality of her research subject or indulge in the breast beating about the republic's fate that her subject often invites. Her conclusion, which continues to demonstrate the narrative starchiness of a political scientist, emphasizes that "the poll apparatus does provide some semblance of the public's voice for an institution distanced from its audience. The combination of the polling apparatus and election imperatives moderates fears of direction and followership and produces a modicum of responsiveness for the public" (145).

The pressing question that Heith implicitly raises—but refuses to tackle—remains, Why the ambivalence? It is striking that in a nation so committed to consent of the governed, the modern mechanism for assessing the people's will seems so threatening. Clearly, the Founders' paradoxical message—to value the people but fear the mob—continues to resonate widely in America, two centuries after the drafting of the constitution.