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Polls, What Polls?

Submitted by davidswanson on Thu, 2006-12-28 19:56. Polls

By David Swanson

I have a lot of respect for Joel Wendland, so this article of his ("Impeachment: A Note of Caution") disturbs me. Just after criticizing someone else for making claims without citing sufficient sources, Wendland writes this:

while polls show that voters soundly rebuffed Bush’s war policy and Republican corruption, and are seriously concerned about the administration’s handling of the economy and many social issues, the movement for impeachment has yet to be effectively built. Simple as that.

Simple, huh? So simple that Joel doesn't cite a single poll, not even any of the few that have been done. Had he done so, he would have noticed that by a margin of 51% to 44% according to Newsweek's latest, Americans favor Bush's impeachment as either a high or low priority (it's safe to assume a significantly larger majority favors impeaching Cheney). He would have also seen that just prior to the election surveys showed that Americans expected that if the Democrats won a majority they would impeach - a belief that didn't prevent a Democratic sweep. Of course most polling doesn't, and all exit polling didn't, ask about impeachment at all. But that's far from a "simple" matter, and I know that Joel knows better than to read into that something more than the agenda of the corporations doing the polling. He's right that we have a movement to build, but the evidence for that is to be seen in the streets, not in any polls I know of.

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