There are garbage polls, and then there's reality

RedState blogger E Pluribus Unum poses a question:

Everybody is aware of political polls. Most conservatives view most polls as suspect at best, a propaganda tool of the American left. Demonstrating the foundation of that suspicion is not required to make my point, so I won’t bother, but a typical conservative will dismiss out of hand any poll not from Zogby or Rasmussen.

While both the majority media and the political left have their purposes for fudging their public polls to accomplish political ends, it’s also true that the political left wants to know the true numbers. Even crooked businesses will show one set of books to the IRS, yet keep another set that shows the true state of the business. They are, after all, in the business of making a profit.

So I ask you this: do you really think that if the Democrats really believed Obama’s approval-disapproval rating was 58-30 (CBS News/NYT, yesterday), and the Democrats led 50-44 (Gallup, 2 weeks ago) in a generic congressional ballot, the House Blue Dogs would have given the finger this week to Pelosi, Emanuel, and Obama, and the leadership would have allowed such impudence?

It sort of reminds me of a few years ago, when we kept hearing from poll after poll and pundit after pundit about how unpopular the Iraq war was, yet the politicians kept voting to fund it. And those pesky voters kept re-electing the most staunch supporters of the military effort.

I've often thought it was best, when trying to gauge true trends in public opinion, to watch what the politicians do, not listen to what the pollsters say.