A Fallible Priesthood

He keeps his ear to the ground so close that he gets it full of grasshoppers much of the time.

-House Speaker "Uncle Joe"

Cannon on William McKinley Lyndon Johnson keeps his ear as close to the ground as any President in history, but what mostly seems to get in his ears these days are bothersome creatures called psephologists. When his 70%-approval ratings were a dime a dozen, the President's inside coat pocket always bulged with polls, ready to be yanked out and proudly displayed at a moment's notice. Since his popularity went into a decline, he has tended to keep those polls out of view, if not quite out of mind. Last week he had a rare choice: the pollsters had him up and down at the same time.

Inexact & Erratic. The Gallup Poll, oldest of the national polls, reported that L.B.J.'s "popularity has risen from his October low" and that 48% of the people now approve of him, v. 44% in October. (In New York State, a recent survey by Pollster John Kraft showed that more New Yorkers said they liked Johnson (66%) than said they liked Bobby Kennedy (56%). That was news calculated to help the President recuperate, but the pollsters did not stop there. Pollster Lou Harris weighed in with quite a contrary finding: "Confidence in the overall job the President is doing has sunk to an alltime low of 43% approval."

Who is the President -and the country -to believe? The pollsters, of course, point out that the two differing polls were taken at different times by different methods, but their appearance in the same week is proof that polling is an inexact and erratic procedure. The pollsters have become so entrenched on the political scene in the past few years, snaps Maryland's Republican Representative Charles Mathias, that "they've reached a position where they're almost a new kind of priesthood." Last week's results fed an increasing skepticism about the value and methods of the polls. "We don't give a damn about them," says John T. Morgan, staff director of the House Democratic Study Group. And New Yorker William Pfeiffer, campaign manager for Governor Nelson Rockefeller this year, simply discarded all the polls that almost universally made Rocky an underdog. "They never bothered me. I knew they had to be wrong."

More to Learn. Though the polls take themselves too seriously -and are usually taken too seriously -they do offer a kind of instant insight into the broader views of Americans and can catch sharp turns in public opinion. As a basis for making decisions, though, they are perilous guidelines indeed; not even Lyndon Johnson, for all his poll watching, has been accused of making policy on the basis of polls. "We take them seriously up to a point, but pollsters have a long way to go in learning their trade," says William Roberts, partner in California's successful political public relations firm of Spencer-Roberts & Associates, which helped Ronald Reagan to victory. "In the meantime," he adds, "I predict they are going to keep on making a lot of money from all of us." That is one prediction that most pollsters particularly hope is true.

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