Poll-driven John Kerry

Senator Kerry’s opinions and understandings on any particular day have known to be poll-driven. James Taranto today points to Ryan Lizza’s article on the New Republic, which shows how ridiculously religiously the Kerry campaign followed the polls.

Polls are unreliable and subjective by their very nature, though they can be useful when taken in the broader context of more objective measures. Numbers don’t lie (well, sometimes they do, especially after having been crunched by statisticians). For example, one can measure the effectiveness of welfare reform by hard numbers: government payout, number of recipients, people going back to the workforce, etc. It is a sign of intellectual weakness to rely heavily on fickle polls for understanding a particular issue, that John Kerry seemed to have that failing.