Article: Democracy Corpse

The Take Back America conference produced some stunningly boring speeches, speeches that many had heard before, speeches (like Hillary's) that no one had any use for, speeches that make Al Gore seem lively. But the pollsters from Democracy Corps(e) took the prize. I skipped most of the conference and still heard their presentation three endless times in different sessions. If we had to have endless droning accounts from pollsters, did it have to always be the same pollsters? And if it did, couldn't they have polled on more questions, and more interesting questions.

(I understand MoveOn presented a poll, which I missed, showing that Iraq is the number one issue on people's minds - something that, as far as I know, every poll has shown for quite some time.)

Like all Democratic pollsters, Democracy Corpse looks for where people are and then devises ways not to offend them. These guys never seem to look for where people might be persuaded to be.

But even in those defensive loser terms, DC fails to ask some crucial questions about where people are, fails to draw good conclusions from the questions asked, and invents findings from questions not asked.

They've found, quite credibly I think, that a Democrat running for Congress this year will do very well by tying the Republican opponent to Bush, by being seen as an agent of change, by being anti-Washington, and by making the election interesting and exciting. If I wanted to do all of those things, and I'd seen this morning's response to Feingold's speech, or if I even had a sense of decency, I would immediately come out for impeachment.

Democracy Corpse doesn't poll on impeachment and tries to avoid explaining why. The closest I got to an answer out of any of them was that focus groups tend to show that people like to move forward and not look back. Brilliant. But how can you move anything forward with Bush and Cheney in office? How can you stop everything from moving backward without impeachment? And why can't a candidate run on a platform with more than one proposal in it?

I asked Congressional Candidate Tony Trupiano what he thought, and he said DC's defense of avoiding impeachment sounded like nonsense. "Why isn't impeachment moving forward?" asked Trupiano.