Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>
> The question is also prefaced by a lot of factual questions on Iraq,
> the Patriot Act, and SUVs. That also stacks the results, since it
> puts respondents into a certain frame of mind before they're asked
> this question. It'd be an interesting experiment to see how answers
> would differ based on whether the factual questions were asked or
> not, or if a different set of questions were asked. But they don't do
> that. This is a poll designed to evoke a certain set of responses. If
> the right did something like this, we'd be denouncing it as
> Murdochian.
Door-to-door "polling" can be used (and was used by some J.O.I.N. locals in the mid-60s) as an organizing technique. The questionnaire can be designed to lead people to think about topics that they had never focused on before, and of course (as you point out here)the questions can be designed both to provide information _and_ to pose hypothetical situations. Impeachment of a president is too general and vague a matter to be itself a useful topic, but it illustrates the structure. "If X & Y were the case, what would be your view on Z?" This also creates the context in which one of the useful principles of Alinsky-style organizing can be brought to bear: the chief agitational organ is not the tongue but the ears! (Cf. the "speak bitterness" sessions which have always been a major instrument of organizing peasants in "people's war.")*
Carrol
*P.S. The analogy I draw here between "speak bitterness" (also called armed propaganda) and a neighborhood survey suggests the sort of abstraction and "reconcretion" (is that a word?) needed to learn from revolutionary struggles under radically different conditions than we face.