Pols vs. Polls (follow-up)

Bruce commented on my last post by pointing me to Zogby's actual poll results. [link] Shame on me for not finding the results myself. Anyway, Bruce also challenged Zogby's own statement to Nicholas Kristoff regarding "manufacturing results" by the Bush Administration.

Respectfully, I disagree.

Bruce writes In the question on models, it's true that US democratic model got 23%, but that was out of a field of 8 choices the poll offered, and it was the largest specific choice. So it's true to say it won. Claiming "hands-downness" for that win may be hyperbole, but there are no established standards of "hands-downness" that I know of.

It seems disingenuous to me to say that a US style democracy was the preferred political model, based on the results of the poll. Actually, given the margin of error (+/- 4.1%), the US (23.3%) was in a statisical dead heat with "Not Sure" (21.9%). At the same time, the cumulative results tell a more nuanced story -- a cumulative 29.3% chose "Saudi Arabia" (17.4%) or "Syria" (11.9%) as their preferred political model, while a cumulative 26.4% chose either the US or the loosely-democratic Iran (3.1%) as their preferred model. Since neither Saudi Arabia nor Syria could be characterized as even "loosely" democratic, I'm not willing to say that a democratic model (whether US-style or indigineous) "won".

Perhaps the best evidence that democracy didn't win is the result of another question in the poll: Which of the following statements, A or B, comes closer to your view? A: Democracy can work well in Iraq. B: Democracy is a Western way of doing things and it will not work here. Statement B beat Statement A 50.8% to 38.6%.

At best, given the margin of error, a hybrid category -- call it "some form of democracy" -- finished in a three way tie with "not sure" and a second hybrid category, "some form of authoritarianism". But given the question about attitudes toward democracy, I have to say that the edge goes to "Not Democracy" over "Democracy."

Now, I agree that there's no standard for "hands-downness" (an elegant term, if ever I heard one!), but I think that reasonable minds can agree that one who finishes in, at best, a three-way tie doesn't "win hands-down" by any standard you can name. And given the attitudes question, I think "hands down" was a lie.

Bruce continues: On the second question, again "stay for a year" was the most popular answer. If you add the "1 YR" and the "2+ yrs" responses, they, in fact, do add up to a majority of the total responses. So where is the lie?

Fair's fair. As explained below, I think Vice President Cheney may have been "technically correct" and therefore technically "not lying." Here, I think the problem is in the question. According to the poll results summary, the question was "Given a choice, would you like to see the American and British forces leave Iraq in six months, one year, or two years or more?" The results were 31.6% for "six months", 34% for "one year" and 25% for "two years or more".

The problem, of course, is the "one year" answer -- it can be added to either of the other two answers to prove your point, because it doesn't answer whether "out in one year" is a firm deadline (that is, one year at the outside) or an approximate period. Thus, the poll results could reasonably be interpreted to say that 65.6% of those surveyed want the US out within a year, or they could be interpreted to mean that 59% are content to wait a year or more before the troops leave. Given that ambiguity, Vice President Cheney's statement -- that a majority of Iraqis want American troops to stay at least another year -- is technically correct.

Bruce concludes The lie might be in the government cherry picking arguably favorable responses and ignoring the more challenging ones. But even here, there are several other favorable to US interest answers in other questions on Zogby's poll, such as religious pluralism being favored and Bin Laden being disapproved of. I suspect there are biases all around, but that Kristoff's and Zogby's, while different from those of the administration, are no smaller.

Cherry-picking only the favorable results is a recurring theme in this administration, and that's why I hesitate to give Vice President Cheney the benefit of the doubt. As you point out, there are "favorable results" elsewhere in the survey, but interestingly, the Bush administration didn't choose to highlight those results as evidence of progress. They chose to highlight one statistic that I think was at best, misleading, and at worst, an outright lie, and one statistic that was at best ambiguous.

That hardly gives me confidence in the administration.