Wednesday, June 21, 2006

FDR Polled Public During WWII

This is amazing. Tony Snow goes on CNN and talks smack regarding polling on the Iraq War:
If somebody had taken a poll in the Battle of the Bulge, I dare say people would have said, wow, my goodness, what are we doing here? But you cannot conduct a war based on polls.
Talkingpointsmemo has an amazing comeback - FDR actually conducted polls during World War II to gauge public support for the war! You can see the full document here. The thing even tracks the public's opinion of whether the government's asked people to make enough sacrifices, which I always assumed was a bullshit modern-day argument. While this minorly cool in a "Ha-Ha, Tony Snow you're wrong!" sort of way, it's majorly cool in that we were actually doing polling during the WWII. It's just neat that things weren't so very different back then.

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