Walt Kelly's once wildly famous cartoon character, Pogo, said it forty years ago. "We have met the enemy and he is us." Nothing better explains our current obsessive and somewhat morbid fascination with those we've dubbed "pundits" and "pollsters" and to whom we have mistakenly granted a degree of expertise they may not deserve. We watch and read them - men and women, young and old, black and white, Hispanic, Asian and otherwise - and we believe them. Why? Not why do we read or listen to them? Not why do we watch them everyday on our TVs, mobile devices and computers? But, why do we believe them? We watch other people on the same media we use to view the pundits, but we don't believe George Clooney. He's acting! And we know that. Why then do we think the people who write about politics are not also actors? They're in show business, aren't they? Why do we take them - and what they say - seriously? You know who they are.
Right now, "they" are all saying the Republicans are cakewalking their way toward a massive electoral victory in November. The Democrats will lose their majority. The GOP will sweep to victory in "The People's House." And, the current Democratic majority in the Senate is threatened with defeat as well. How do we know this? Why do we seem to believe it? Because that's what we're being told on TV and in the press by "those in the know." These are the people we have designated "experts." Are they expert because they have demonstrated expertise? Not hardly. They are revered only because we revere them.
Go back a little. Check the pundits and polls from 2005 through 2008. You might be surprised. From 2005 until the primaries began in 2008, every political poll showed Hillary Clinton as the automatic nominee of the Democratic Party in 2008. Survey USA, for example, had Clinton and McCain running almost unopposed for three years. They even did a state-by-state general election prediction. In case you missed it, Mrs. Clinton won. Many other polling organizations did the same thing. They all "gave" the Democratic nomination to Hillary Clinton. I doubt those polls tell prospective new clients about their 2005-2008 data. But, does anyone pay attention to these polls today? Go ahead admit it. Of course you do.
Respected publications like The Atlantic calmly predicted a Hillary Clinton presidency as early as July/August 2005. The Washington Monthly eagerly agreed in the summer of 2005. But who didn't back then? Look it up, you'll see. And there was no letup. The Kiplinger Letter, in February 2008, told everyone the coming election would pit Mrs. Clinton against Rudy Giuliani. Only months to go before the actual election and Senators McCain and Obama didn't rate a mention.
CNN treated a Presidential political prediction as just more confirmation of what everyone already knew. On September 24, 2007 President Bush told CNN there was no question that Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic nominee. The interviewer neglected to ask Bush about Barack Obama. For all we know neither of them knew who Obama was. Showing off his analytical acumen, a smiling Bush added that whoever the GOP nominee would be, he would beat Mrs. Clinton in "a close election." Nobody at CNN raised an eyebrow at that prediction.
When the 2008 primary season began in earnest all the cable TV hot-shots were telling us John McCain was a "has-been." He was washed-up, broke and just too old to make it to the nomination. MSNBC was ready to dispatch an ambulance and oxygen. We were told instead Giuliani was a political genius for skipping the early primaries. Waiting for Florida was the sure way to win the nomination. Millions of TV viewers ate it up, just as they bought the line that Hillary was a better bet than Rachel Alexandra running against farm horses. All sides said the same thing, from Air America and MSNBC all the way to the networks and even FOX NEWS.
Then, when the mysterious, dynamic, young Senator from Illinois (we hadn't been told yet that he was from Kenya) suddenly had enough delegates by February to practically have the nomination wrapped up, the pundits and pollsters didn't skip a beat. Mrs. Clinton would win anyway. In March 2008, we were told by all the experts that millions of Democrats - nearly all of them white women - would vote Republican if their Warrior Queen was denied "her" nomination. It didn't matter that she would lose fair and square. An Obama win would be an empty victory. After all, they said, a black man or a half-black man, an African American from Hawaii or Indonesia - or wherever he really came from - he could never beat a white war hero Republican. That's what we were told - by the experts.
Remember, as late as the final days before the election, these same experts were certain "white working class voters" in places like Western Pennsylvania would desert the Democratic Party like rats from a sinking ship rather than vote for a black President. The black vote in Philadelphia, we were told, just wouldn't be enough. McCain wins PA! Do you need to check the video tape? That's what they said. And then Barack Obama carried Pennsylvania in a rout by 11 points.
Didn't all these same experts tell us how crucial the Sarah Palin choice as VP was? Her convention appearance was - Brilliant! Weren't we bombarded with stories about the new vitality she brought to the GOP? Was there a pundit anywhere who predicted what a joke Palin would become, a quitter, a C-county pin-up girl, a self-aggrandizing, self-styled ATM, with the political future of a latter day Harold Stassen?
You know, just about every one of those "experts" is still working, still telling us what's ahead. Why are we listening? Why are we buying their stories about an historic American lurch rightward? This comes from the same people and the same publications that fed us their errors and omissions from 2005 through November 2008. Don't we ever learn? Or is it our fault? Was Pogo right?