{"id":88,"date":"2006-02-27T22:05:33","date_gmt":"2006-02-27T22:05:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/02\/27\/king-of-the-wonks\/"},"modified":"2006-02-27T22:05:33","modified_gmt":"2006-02-27T22:05:33","slug":"king-of-the-wonks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/02\/27\/king-of-the-wonks\/","title":{"rendered":"King of the Wonks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>John Zogby, of the Zogby polling agency gave a talk on campus earlier tonight. I have to say, having heard him speak, that whoever came up with the word &#8220;wonk&#8221; probably had somebody like Zogby in mind&#8211; he had poll numbers for absolutely everything he talked about, and for every single question he was asked afterwards. I spent a few minutes trying to think of a question that he wouldn&#8217;t be able to answer with &#8220;I did some polling on that&#8230;,&#8221; but didn&#8217;t come up with anything.<\/p>\n<p>He did have a couple of interesting comments, though, that I&#8217;ll reproduce here for anyone who&#8217;s interested:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The one moment when he got really animated, and departed from the objective-pollster act in a serious way, came when somebody asked him if he had polled Iraqis on what they thought would happen when the US pulls out. He said that fretting about whether the country would slide into civil war is foolish because they&#8217;re already having a civil war. When the questioner asked &#8220;wouldn&#8217;t it get worse if we left?,&#8221; he shot back &#8220;How could it?&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>He was asked a question about the disastrous failure of exit polling in the 2004 election, and basically punted. He agreed that it was a complete debacle, but attributed it to a bunch of factors, from over-sampling of suburban precincts in Ohio to poor training of poll takers in Pennsylvania (he told a story about a woman in Philadelphia who was supposed to be taking an exit poll, but said &#8220;Everyone seems so busy, I hate to ask them any questions.&#8221;). Interestingly, he called the theory that conservative voters just don&#8217;t like to talk to pollsters &#8220;total bullshit,&#8221; noting that no conservative voter he met was the least bit shy about saying who they were voting for.<\/li>\n<li>The best laugh line of the night was when he noted that there are rumblings of discontent in the Republican ranks. Having previously savaged the Democrats for having no politically viable ideas, he noted &#8220;So, you get the chance to watch both parties implode. Go home and make some popcorn.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>The most interesting thing he said was the suggestion that in the next several years, he thinks that Hurricane Katrina will prove to have a bigger effect on American politics than the September 11 attacks. He said that, in his opinion, it will lead to a re-envisioning of the relationship between people and the government, similar to the New Deal or the conservative revolution, and that the party that positions itself to take advantage of that will dominate American politics for the next couple of decades. Unfortunately, he was a little vague about what form the re-envisioning would take, other than that it will involve some form of universal health care, and something to do with government assistance to community and charitable organizations. It&#8217;s an interesting idea, though I&#8217;m not sure I really buy it.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;m not sure where to go with any of that, but I&#8217;ll throw it out there for anyone who wants to comment on it. Or suggest new ideas for re-envisioning the relationship between people and the government&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>John Zogby, of the Zogby polling agency gave a talk on campus earlier tonight. I have to say, having heard him speak, that whoever came up with the word &#8220;wonk&#8221; probably had somebody like Zogby in mind&#8211; he had poll numbers for absolutely everything he talked about, and for every single question he was asked&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/02\/27\/king-of-the-wonks\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">King of the Wonks<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-88","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}