unzip the trousers of analysis

Interesting piece in the Times by Us pollster Frank Luntz, who I believe is close to the Republicans.

The big loser of the evening, was Mr Blair. He was called “liar”, “dishonest”, “promise breaker”, and “patronising” — and that was by his 2001 Labour supporters. The feeling of everyone was the same: incredibly high hopes when he came to office in 1997 and shattered expectations today.

The problem for Mr Blair, and why Labour could have its majority sliced in half, is that the more he struggles to lower public expectations, the more he sinks in people’s estimation.

The more Mr Blair tells voters he is listening, the more convinced they are that he is not. The more he claims he is not courting popularity, the more they assume he is just spinning. Mr Blair, if you read these words . . . stop.

Except that he can’t stop now, unless he’s going to say nothing at all until May 6. New Labour always did mood music. Now the mood’s flipped. The punters used to think Blair was capable of anything. Now they think he’s capable of anything. Onwards:

And it gets worse, much worse. Our 30 swing voters were given “people meters” — small, handheld dials that they turned up or down to register their second-by-second reaction to speeches, news clips or party political broadcasts. Up is good. Down is bad.

We showed them the first few moments of the recent White House press conference where President Bush and Mr Blair stood side-by-side and talked about “a clear way forward” in Iraq. The dials plummeted. Never in 17 years of moderating people-meter sessions have I seen an audience react so negatively even before the first word had been spoken. Every dial fell.

It’s really hard to assess the impact Iraq’s actually had on voters. I’ve always been inclined to think of it as a meta-issue, one which informs the way in which people think of Blair's general record, rather than being a major issue in itself.

On the other hand, I think people have a strong basic moral predisposition against starting unnecessary wars, and that this is shared by people of all political viewpoints and none. Most of us are Westphalians at heart. After all, the war was sold because it was necessary – because Iraq posed a threat to us. It might even have been possible to sell Iraq as a war in the national interest, a war for cheap oil and friendly government in charge of it. But that was unsayable, at least by a Labour government in the UK. Absent those issues it comes across as a crime, irrespective of the outcome.

Not that the outcome's been great, of course. We were promised cheering crowds and liberation on the cheap, and instead got suicide bombers and people having their heads sawn off live on TV. George and Tony, a couple of lightweights, meddled in things they didn’t understand and gave us a good hard look at the abyss. Hey! Over here! Purple fingers! Nope, doesn’t work.

This is something that the pro-war left in particular don’t seem to understand. From their point of view, opposition to the war was simply selfish. What, don’t you want to liberate the Iraqis? But in posing as Orwell, they simply come across as Nechaev: to love others is to drive them into a hail of bullets. They need to stop going to so many dinner parties and mix more with real people.

Maybe Iraq is a direct issue after all. Not that the UK has become pacifist. But the punters don’t want Tony handling weapons. Anyway:

The big winners of the evening were the Liberal Democrats, no thanks to Charles Kennedy. The most common phrase used by the swing voters to describe their attitude to him was “don’t know”. Heading towards his second general election as leader, Mr Kennedy still has not defined himself. When asked which of the three leaders they would most want to have a pint with at the pub, more chose him than the other two combined. They have a lot of questions. Mr Kennedy needs to be armed with no-spin answers. A party political broadcast using an unscripted, unedited, live Q&A is what they want to see from him.

I’m not sure they want to see anything specific from him. The more inert he seems, the safer he appears to be - and it's safety, on all sorts of levels, that people are really interested in right now as far as I can see. Also, there’s a general feeling that it’s the Lib Dem’s turn. There’s a respectable enough third party out there, they’ve been around for a bit, can’t do any worse than the other lot, etc. But this isn’t a positive endorsement. It’s part of a general process of turning away from the government.

OK, it’s time to unzip the trousers of analysis and display the throbbing member of prediction. I reckon it’ll be a hung parliament. I can’t say exactly why and I’m in no position to crunch the numbers in detail. But people are walking away from the government, their fingers in their ears. I just feel that a hung parliament is the point at which the journey will end. I can’t put it in any more detail than that. Anyway, why exactly do you want to look inside my trousers?

UPDATE: edited slightly, for reasons of improved coherence. You get really rough drafts of history here.

Comments

[dsquared]

My money is also on "hung". Btw, if you were wondering, I have it on good information that Luntz' slightly odd hairstyle is most likely some form of wig or weave, as the missus' brother was at university with him and distinctly remembers him suffering some sort of alopecia.