[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 26 (Thursday, February 9, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Page S2428]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[[Page S2428]]
                      YOU CAN'T LEAD BY FOLLOWING

 Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, in going over some old newspapers 
that I missed while I was in Illinois over the Christmas/New Year 
holiday, I came across an op-ed piece by Robin Gerber, a senior fellow 
at the University of Maryland's Center for Political Leadership and 
Participation.
  It comments on what I consider to be a fundamental weakness in our 
political process today, that people are trying to follow the polls in 
how they respond to problems.
  There is a great quote in the op-ed piece from our House colleague, 
Steny Hoyer, for whom my admiration has grown through the years. 
Congressman Hoyer states: ``What polls do is confuse us. We're not 
trying to figure out what's right but what is the passion of the day. 
Polls make us sloppy intellectually. They are a substitute for 
thinking.''
  I ask that the Robin Gerber item be printed in the Record.
  The editorial follows:

                      You Can't Lead by Following

                           (By Robin Gerber)

       There is much talk now of governing from the ``center,'' of 
     how centrist politics can overcome the debacle of the Nov. 8 
     election and put the president and his party on a true course 
     for reelection in 1996. But it is the moral center that must 
     be found before the political one can be explored.
       This quest for defining political vision is imperiled by 
     the misplaced reliance by politicians of both parties on 
     public opinion polls.
       Pollsters' authoritative declamations and directions, 
     gleaned from the complex science of gauging the public 
     interest, corrupt the straightforward instincts needed to 
     govern from the gut. Rep. Steny Hoyer, past chairman of the 
     Democratic Caucus, puts it this way, ``What polls do is 
     confuse us. We're not trying to figure out what's right but 
     what is the passion of the day. Polls make us sloppy 
     intellectually. They're a substitute for thinking.''
       In an unprecedented effort to lead by following, 
     politicians of the 1990s use polls to support a new form of 
     hyper-interactive governing. Like some collective 
     psychoanalysis on living room couches across the nation, 
     Americans are being probed and prodded as never before. But 
     you can't legislate by the numbers. From the field of war to 
     the football field, no general or quarterback has led by 
     following the combined opinions of the troops or the tight-
     ends.
       Pollsters argue that polls are valuable market assessment 
     tools, a means to focus policy and message on voters' 
     concerns. Even the Founders acknowledged that candidates who 
     depend on the suffrage of their fellow citizens for election 
     should be informed of those citizens' ``dispositions and 
     inclinations and should be willing to allow them their proper 
     degree of influence.'' But polling in 1994 has gone beyond an 
     ancillary tool for governing or campaigning. Rather than a 
     point of departure for sensitive and thoughtful leaders, 
     polls have
      become a point of no return that overshadows the imperative 
     for leadership. As James MacGregor Burns wrote in his 
     classic text on leadership, ``the transforming leader taps 
     the needs and raises the aspirations and helps shape the 
     values--and hence mobilizes the potential--of followers.'' 
     To be transforming leaders, today's politicians cannot 
     afford to drift, absent the anchor of ideals, in a sea of 
     percentage points.
       Two hundred years ago, the Federalist papers expressed our 
     belief as a nation that ``the public voice pronounced by the 
     representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the 
     public good, than if pronounced by the people themselves.'' 
     Measuring and articulating substantive discontent should 
     serve the purpose of keeping elected representatives' debate 
     and decisions in tune with their constituency, not in 
     automatonic lock-step. Pollster Celinda Lake reads the 
     electorate as wanting to raise the pitch of technologically 
     steered democracy so that citizens could directly bestow 
     their opinion on major legislative issues. In that case, 
     perhaps we should give up on our founding ideal of a republic 
     and elect the pollsters directly.
       Representative democracy is our greatest national heritage 
     and gives us our greatest national challenge. We seek leaders 
     who will listen and interpret sometimes incoherent, sometimes 
     inchoate messages into policies greater than the sum of our 
     collective consciousness. Political leaders who will 
     transform this country, rather than be transfixed by shifting 
     techno-derived edicts, must lead and govern from the center 
     of their own hearts and minds. No poll has yet been devised 
     that can substitute.
     

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