May 15, 1994
WASHINGTON TALK
WASHINGTON TALK; Listening to Voters: Proposal in Congress for Polls
By ADAM CLYMER,
WASHINGTON— To help it serve the people, Congress already has barbers and garage attendants and elevator operators on automatic elevators. It has parliamentarians and sergeants-at-arms and even ordinary cops. For advice, it can turn to economists, scientists and accountants.
Even so, its work is widely viewed as imperfect.
So here's an idea. To overcome the impression that senators and representatives do not care what the people think, maybe Congress should hire a pollster.
That proposal is embodied in H.R. 4081, a bill introduced not long ago by Representative Ron Klink, Democrat of Pennsylvania, and ardently promoted by Alan Kay, a retired, wealthy businessman who established the Americans Talk Issues Foundation to do polls on issues he thinks are important.
Their arguments, though the bill is getting nowhere, are intriguing. They reflect both an acceptance of the public view of Congress as a trivial institution that serves itself and special interests and a proposed solution for that problem that only underscores the reasons for the public's distrust.
The Ross Perot view of what is wrong with Congress is that it is so caught up in itself that it does not care what the people think, that it won't vote for a constitutional amendment to require a balanced budget, or impose term limits on itself or stop wasting money.
A differing view is that Congress is already too much a weather vane whose careerist tendencies cause too slavish an effort to move every time the public wind shifts.
Mr. Klink's argument seeks to finesse that issue. Whether it is good or bad, he says, members of Congress already rely heavily on all sorts of faulty measures about what the nation thinks, from telephone tallies to deluges of postcards to what they read or hear about real public opinion polls. What troubles him is that they do not know whether their information is any good.
So he wants an office to do scientific public opinion polls on a regular basis to provide the authoritative answers. "If we are going to do it," the freshman Democrat from the Pittsburgh suburbs said recently, "and we are doing it, make sure the polling is for real."
Mr. Kay's argument is grander. At the recent 49th annual convention of the American Association for Public Opinion Research in Danvers, Mass., he maintained, "In every issue area no one is yet adequately researching what people want, majority or consensus, for national policy and legislation."
And the poll gap, he contended, doomed lawmakers to "failing to fulfill a constitutionally assigned responsibility, specifically the responsibility for representing their constituents."
"The public wants its voice heard just as loud as the lobbyist," Mr. Kay said.
He did not have an easy time of it. Other pollsters disagreed. Thad Cantril from Cambridge, Mass. argued from the back of the room that the public's voice was an uncertain beacon for legislators. "We would never have had a Marshall Plan if we had followed public opinion," Mr. Cantril said. "One of the reasons we don't have a serious foreign policy is because we pay too much attention to public opinion."
And Cliff Zukin, director of the Eagleton Institute at Rutgers, agreed and added the argument that "on most issues, there isn't public opinion" in any firm, definite sense. Any effort to denote an authoritative finding of what America thinks on an issue, Mr. Zukin said, "is probably dangerous."
Mr. Klink disagrees. He recently wrote: "I am not proposing government by polling, any more than we have government by polling with the current system of guessing the public will. However, there comes a time when leaders need to know the will of the nation on a given subject."
Mr. Kay offered another argument. He said the public's belief that Congress was unresponsive led it to make all sorts of drastic demands. His polling had found huge majorities for such extreme measures as Congressional pay cuts or term limits or binding national referendums on major issues, he said, and a polling office that would frame issues to find consensus would be a much simpler change.
One alternative he did not pose was raised by the 18th-century statesman Edmund Burke in his Speech to the Electors of Bristol. Even though a vote he cast in Parliament cost him re-election, he told the electors in November 1774, "Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion."
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