Stephen Hayes wrote good column about Dick Cheney, but there are two short points that really stand out:

First isn't so much about Cheney but about former CIA Director George Tenet's assessment of the heavily debated and controversial CIA and military interrogation methods.

The policies he has advocated have been controversial. But they have also been effective. Consider the procedures put in place to extract information from hardcore terrorists. Mr. Cheney did not dream up these interrogation methods, but when intelligence officials insisted that they would work, the vice president championed them in internal White House debates and on Capitol Hill. Former CIA Director George Tenet--a Clinton-era appointee and certainly no Cheney fan--was asked about the value of those interrogation programs in a recent television appearance. His response, ignored by virtually everyone in the media, was extraordinary.

"Here's what I would say to you, to the Congress, to the American people, to the president of the Untied States: I know that this program has saved lives. I know we've disrupted plots. . . . I know this program alone is worth more than the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency put together, have been able to tell us."
No matter what you think of George Tenet - and believe me I'm hardly a fan of the man - it's nonetheless worth noting when the (then) head of our nations most important intelligence gathering group calls our interrogation program the single most important of them all.

The next point is to me the epitome of my primary criticisms of the entire Bush administration - their absolute failure at using the bully pulpit.

As the White House enters a critical domestic phases of the war on terror--with a heightened threat environment and the coming report from Gen. David Petraeus on progress in Iraq--Mr. Cheney may be called on to play a more public role. That may seem counterintuitive. If Mr. Cheney's approval ratings are so abysmal, why increase his visibility? The answer is simple: because his low poll numbers are the result of his low profile.

Mr. Cheney likes to work in the background and he does not care much about being loved. "Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole?" Mr. Cheney said in 2004. "It's a nice way to operate, actually." But this reticence has a price. Where there is an information vacuum, people move to fill it, particularly in Washington, a town that operates on appearances.
Yep. The Bush public relations failures are indeed directly related to their inability (and in Cheney's case unwillingness) to communicate their ideas.

Labels: Cheney, interrogation, media bias, polls

Doggone, I wish I could write this good.

The Will of the Uninformed
Democracy in America.

By Jonah Goldberg

Huge numbers of Americans don't know jack about their government or politics. According to a Pew Research Center survey released last week, 31 percent of Americans don't know who the vice president is, fewer than half are aware that Nancy Pelosi is the speaker of the House, a mere 29 percent can identify "Scooter" Libby as the convicted former chief of staff of the vice president, and only 15 percent can name Harry Reid when asked who is the Senate majority leader.

And yet, last week, a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that two-thirds of Americans believe that Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales's firing of eight U.S. attorneys was "politically motivated."

So, we are supposed to believe that two-thirds of Americans have studied the details of the U.S. attorney firings and come to an informed conclusion that they were politically motivated — even when Senate Democrats agree that there is no actual evidence that Gonzales did anything improper. Are these the same people who couldn't pick Pelosi out of a lineup? Or the 85 percent who couldn't name the Senate majority leader? Are we to imagine that the 31 percent of the electorate who still — after seven years of headlines and demonization — can't identify the vice president of the United States nonetheless have a studied opinion on the firing of New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias?

Oh, before we proceed, let me make clear: This isn't a column defending Gonzales. This administration should have long ago sent him out of the bunker for a coffee-and-doughnut run and then changed the locks. No, this is a column about how confused and at times idiotic the United States is about polls, public opinion and, well, democracy itself. We all love to tout the glories of democracy and denounce politicians who just follow the polls. Well, guess which politicians follow the polls? The popular ones, that's who. And guess why: Because the popular ones get elected. Bucking public opinion is the quickest way for a politician to expedite his or her transition to the private sector.

More to the point, Americans — God bless 'em — are often quite ignorant about the stuff politicians and pundits think matters most. They may know piles about their own professions, hobbies, and personal interests, but when it comes to basic civics, they get their clocks cleaned on Fox's Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?

Though examples are depressingly unnecessary, here are two of my favorites over the years. In 1987, 45 percent of adult respondents to one survey answered that the phrase "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" was in the Constitution (in fact, it's a quote from Karl Marx). Then, in 1991, an American Bar Association study reported that a third of Americans did not know what the Bill of Rights was.

That the public mood is a poor compass for guiding the ship of state is an old lament. Here are two reasons why.

The first has to do with the laziness, spinelessness, and vanity of political elites. Citing polls as proof you're on the right side of an argument is often a symptom of intellectual cowardice. If the crowd says two plus two equals seven, that's no reason to invoke the authority of the crowd. But pundits and pols know that if they align themselves with the latest Gallup findings, they don't have to defend their position on the merits because "the people" are always right. Such is the seductiveness of populism. It means never being wrong. "The people of Nebraska are for free silver, and I am for free silver," proclaimed William Jennings Bryan. "I will look up the arguments later."

Which brings us to ideology. The days when politicians would actually defend small-r republicanism are gone. The answer to every problem in our democracy seems to be more democracy, as if any alternative spells more tyranny. Indeed, once more the "forces of progress" are trying to destroy the Electoral College in the name of democracy. Their beachhead is Maryland, which was the first to approve an interstate compact promising its electors to whichever presidential candidate wins the national popular vote.

If these progressives have their way, we'll soon see candidates ignoring small states and rural areas entirely because democracy means going where the votes are. The old notion that this is a republic in which minority communities have a say will suffer perhaps the final, fatal blow.

But that's O.K., because 70 percent of Americans say they're for getting rid of the Electoral College. And Lord knows, they must be right.

Labels: jonah goldberg, polls, polsters, statistics