Secrets of a Pollster

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NYT

Stan Greenberg, one of America’s most experienced pollsters, sums up the key lesson he learned polling for Bill Clinton, Nelson Mandela, Ehud Barak and Tony Blair: “Bold leaders in tumultuous times always have at least one crash.”

They never come out of the box and deliver the scale of progress and change they promise — not because they are cynical, but because events conspire against them and they encounter competing power centers. What distinguishes the best leaders, he says, is that they learn from their crashes, adjust, persist and succeed.

President Obama has hardly crashed. He’s just getting started. And many, many people — at home and abroad — are rooting for him to succeed. But he definitely is navigating tumultuous times. So when Greenberg called to share the lessons from his new book, “Dispatches from the War Room” — an insider’s account about how the world leaders for whom he polled handled their crashes — I thought: “Those insights might be very useful right now.”

Greenberg kicks off with Bill Clinton. One of his most vivid memories was trying to judge how voters would react to Clinton breaking his oft-stated promise to cut middle-class taxes, right after his 1992 election. They held focus groups in New Jersey. What struck him most, said Greenberg, was that these voters “just didn’t believe any politician would cut their taxes.” That wasn’t how they were judging Clinton.

(More here.)