One of the raps against Bill Clinton in the popular press was that his administration put a lot of energy into reading and following polls. This never made much sense to me -- it seems like, in a representative democracy, elected officials ought to be taking their constituents' opinions into account as much as possible. And while polls aren't perfect, I've never seen anybody take issue with a particular poll's methodology when the results favored their side.

I suspect that what was actually going on was an application of the big strong leader myth, most recently on display following Brownie's removal from New Orleans, when Chris Matthews demanded that the burly and virile Dick Cheney send a real man to take care of things. The pundit class wanted somebody who just didn't give a shit about the public and was going to do whatever he wanted anyway. They frame it as a question about "principles," but it's not as if Clinton was coming out for Coke one day and Pepsi the next.

Since Clinton left office, the Democratic Party has fallen prey to every negative narrative the press has to offer about him, including the portrayal of him as a finger-in-the-wind waffler. Now, instead of getting their perceptions of public opinion from polling data, they simply let Republicans and the Beltway pundit class tell them what's what. Molly Ivins gets to the heart of this:

Even if reading polls is not a perfect way to run a campaign or a government, it is a damn sight better than not reading polls. Howard Dean understands this. State-level Dems like Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer understand this. Even certain liberal pundits understand this, and I might be convinced that Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi kind of get it, too. The rest of the national leadership of the Democratic Party doesn't. The people running the DCCC and DSCC don't. Joes Biden and Lieberman don't. This is why I almost certainly won't vote for Herb Kohl this year, to be honest.

One of things that I hope blogs are mature enough to accomplish this year is to create a shadow network that can operate apart from the party's power structure -- a group of people able to exchange information on a national level and act as opinion-leaders in their own districts. In order to rival the existing power structure, though, everything's going to have to be working efficiently and together, in a focused way. One issue -- winning on strength.