Winning Progressive

Over the course of this Presidential campaign, we’ve learned one thing about Mitt Romney – that he is willing to say virtually anything if he thinks it will get him a vote.  A case in point is last week’s Presidential debate in Denver, where Romney told at least 27 falsehoods in only 38 minutes of speaking, which is an average of one lie every 86 seconds.  Whether Romney was talking about his tax plans, Medicare, green energy development, Dodd Frank, etc., virtually every major utterance by Romney at the debate turned out to have little to no connection to the truth.  And Romney’s performance at the debate was typical for him, as throughout this campaign Romney has repeatedly launched attack after attack on President Obama that are well-known to be simply false.  Over at the Maddow Blog, Steven Benen has a 38-part series chronicling the numerous falsehoods that Romney tells every week. And, of course, Romney’s willingness to frequently create entirely new positions on issues has rightly earned him the nickname “Multiple Choice Mitt.”

Romney’s nearly pathological lying matters for at least two reasons.  First is that our democracy can only function if candidates and elected officials abide by some basic connection to reality.  Our system is designed as a representative democracy, in which our elected officials make the fundamental decisions regarding how our society is to be governed but must ultimately answer to the people who determine, through elections, whether such officials get elected or re-elected.  But the ability of the people to ensure that the system remains representative is short-circuited if our elected officials deliberately and consistently lie about what they are planning to do or are doing because the public cannot really know what they are voting for or against.  And if a campaign that is as detached from reality as Romney’s is able to succeed, it sets an extremely bad precedent for even greater levels of mendacity from future candidates.

The second reason that Romney’s willingness to lie with abandon matters is that a review of our nation’s history over the past fifty or so years shows that virtually every major policy disaster has been based on or grown out of blatant lying by a Presidential Administration.  The litany of such disasters are likely familiar to most readers, but bear repeating:

* Gulf of Tonkin – In August 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson, eager to escalate US involvement in the Vietnam War, fabricated the Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which North Vietnamese torpedo boats allegedly launched attacks on US ships engaging in routine patrols.  President Johnson’s August 4 speech about the “incident” led to incredulous media reporting and paved the way for the U.S. getting mired in the war.  The result was more than 58,000 U.S. soldiers killed and 150,000 wounded.

* Watergate – President Richard Nixon’s willingness to lie and cheat in order to advance his Presidency and win re-election ultimately led to “a massive campaign of political espionage, sabotage and other illegal activities against real or perceived opponents” that represented “a brazen and daring assault, led by Nixon himself, against the heart of American democracy: the Constitution, our system of free elections, the rule of law.”  The result was a Constitutional crisis in which President Nixon became the only President to resign in office and the jailing of 40 of the President’s aides and associates.

* Iran Contra – Having been stymied in his efforts to US taxpayer dollars going to fund the Contras insurgency against the leftist Sandinista government that had come to power in Nicaragua, the Reagan Administration decided to clandestinely sell arms to Iran in exchange for the release of a handful of American hostages, and then use the proceeds from those sales to fund weapons for the Contras.

* The Lewinsky Scandal – While of a far lower magnitude than the other lies on this list, President Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky and subsequent blatantly false denial of that affair to the American people opened the door to Republicans almost creating a Constitutional crisis through the impeachment of the President for only the second time in U.S. history.

* The 2003 Invasion of Iraq – President George W. Bush’s Administration told a cavalcade of lies to create an excuse for invading Iraq.  The result was the death of more than 4,40o US soldiers, an estimated 1.4 million Iraqi civilians dead, and a direct financial cost of more than $800 billion with indirect costs (interest on debt, caring for veterans, etc.) bringing the cost to at least $3 trillion.

Romney’s willingness to say virtually anything in order to get elected does not bode well for what he and the people he would fill his Administration with would do if they were in the White House.  We’ve seen from Presidents Johnson, Nixon, Clinton, and George W. Bush that the Office of the Presidency creates the temptation to lie, often with disastrous effect.  Now imagine what would happen with someone such as Mitt Romney for whom lying appears to be second nature.

Some may respond that all politicians lie.  But there is a large difference between the occasional shading of the truth or misstatements that  most politicians engage in at some point, and the type of pervasive repetition of claims that directly contradict statements made only days or weeks before and/or that have been widely and consistently debunked.  And it is this latter type of persistent and blatant lying that Romney engages in, and that raises serious concerns about what sorts of scandals or foreign policy misadventures would occur in a Romney Administration.

The contrast with the Obama Administration here is especially instructive, as President Obama’s first term has been essentially scandal free.  The $250 billion or so in direct spending under the 2009 stimulus bill was distributed with virtually no corruption or fraud.  The handful of times that there have been credible allegations of corrupt behavior by an Administration official, that official has been compelled to resign quickly.  The small number of Obama Administration “scandals” that Republicans have managed to cook up – such as Solyndra – have turned out to be big nothingburgers.  And a review of President Obama’s speeches and the White House and campaign websites show that, for the most part, the Obama Administration tries to do what it says it is going to do.

There are numerous reasons to re-elect President Obama. One of the biggest is the issue of honesty.  The Obama Administration has an overall good record with regards to honesty.  Over this Presidential campaign, however, Mitt Romney has shown that he does not even seem to be acquainted with the concept of honesty.  History shows just how risky it is to gamble with putting someone as mendacious as Mitt Romney in the White House.

If you share our concerns with Mitt’s mendacity,  share the Obama campaign video below calling Romney out for his lies at the Denver debate.

(By Mark Bridger, cross-posted at That MansScope)

Atlanta Mayor Kaseem Reed (D) recently said that the reason Mitt Romney is now trailing President Obama is because Mitt Romney is a “defective” candidate who continually makes mistakes.

Actually, Mr. Reed is off by one layer of causality. Mitt Romney is a defective candidate because he is a defective human being. This conclusion became pretty clear as we learned some of his past history, and becomes clearer each day as both his private and public comments receive increased attention.

We have learned that Romney has always been a bully — a quality often reinforced by feelings of entitlement. What can be more entitled than coming from a very wealthy family and knowing that your future would be secure no matter what you did — no college debts to be paid off by a struggling young Mitt. We know about how he and a bunch of his pals attacked a fellow student and forcibly cut his hair — they thought he was effeminate. Unlike his friends who were in on the attack — an act that nowadays would be considered felonious — Romney claims not to remember the incident. The others realized, to their credit, that what they did was wrong, and feel bad about it to this day. Romney tosses off whatever might have happened as just another youthful prank. And there were others for which he was well-known among his peers. He would sometimes impersonate a police officer in order to terrorize couples making out in their cars — things like that, ’cause that’s the kind of guy he was: a barrel of laughs. It was OK because he was rich and entitled — a never-have-to-say-you’re-sorry kind of guy.

I will skip most of the religious stuff. I’ll just add that spending a lot of time evangelizing Mormonism to poor people in the U.S. and overseas is not my idea of a socially useful activity — but that’s just me. Tithing to the Mormon church is a little like contributing to a very wealthy college: generally harmless, but nothing of such societal value as to be worth a tax deduction (though they are given). Of course, for Romney, it lead to another entitlement common to his class: not having to serve in Vietnam. Funny how his kind of people who are so ideologically in favor of such wars are rarely asked to serve in them.

Then we come to his business. “Vulture capitalism” is exactly the correct phrase to describe Bain Capital; maybe “bully capitalism” is equally correct. Bain sought out weak companies either to loot for “consulting fees” or to turn around by cutting employees’ benefits, retirement funds, and jobs. While some survived and prospered, others were destroyed. In all cases Bain Capital made out very well, as did its CEO and owner. When you pick on people weaker than you, that’s how things turn out.

How did Romney get to own and control such a company? He found many willing investors via his contacts within his very wealthy circle and, it now turns out, from South and Central American business people offering very questionable money they wanted to launder. Romney made a point of not knowing too much about the sources of this money, but probing reporters are finding out more each day. As the old saying goes: “Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.” Romney never worried about this, in spite of his supposed religious values, because he was… well… entitled.

Of course, all young folks can “make it like Mitt” even if they don’t have much money personally. When asked how, Romney made it simple: Just borrow money from your parents. Money means nothing to Romney, and he has no conception of how hard most people must work just to make a small amount of it, and that the vast percentage of Americans have very little in savings and retirement funds (he has amassed a virtually impossible $100 million in his IRA.)

We know that Romney made a lot of money and paid a very low tax rate on it. Of course, that’s typical of many rich people who make money that is taxed at capital gains rates. He also has hidden millions of dollars in offshore secret tax havens. These are not necessarily illegal — though we can be rightly suspicious — but indicate a less than patriotic attitude toward giving back anything to a country that facilitated his huge personal wealth. After all, people in public life are always waving the flag and telling us how selfless it is for those in the armed forces to sacrifice life, limb and fortune to serve their country (see his evangelistic draft evasion above). Romney is the anti-selfless person, who thinks that paying “not one penny” above his minimal required taxes is the most presidential — and to his lights, patriotic — thing to do. He is the Leona Helmsley of presidential candidates: taxes are for the “little” folk, not for the entitled.

Minimal Mitt is, effectively, his sobriquet and motto.

Yet, in spite of his minimal taxes, he sneers — in private, amongst his wealthy donors — at the “47%” who pay “no federal taxes”. He says they pay “no federal taxes”, which is of course not true. They may not pay federal income taxes, but all pay Social Security taxes as well as state property, income and sales taxes when applicable etc. Calling them “entitled” is some sort of transference. He is the one who feels entitled — to all that the federal government does to coddle rich folk like him: the special tax rates and tax breaks that he uses to pay a smaller percentage of his income in taxes than Warren Buffet’s famous secretary. He gladly accepts the roads, bridges, police and military and other benefits and protections which he and his businesses enjoy. As Elizabeth Warren has recently pointed out, this country’s financial system is rigged to favor accumulation of wealth by people like Romney; it is he who acts and feels entitled.

A lot of what passes for straightforward campaign incompetence and lack of sensitivity is, in fact, Romney’s arrogance. He has refused to disclose his income tax returns for all but a couple of years, then claims, falsely, that John Kerry did the same. When told by every news source and fact checker about this error, he refused to acknowledge it. When he recently released his 2011 tax return, it showed that he made up for his under tithing  his church in the previous year by giving extra. However, this would make his tax rate percentage outrageously low in comparison to Buffet’s secretary, so he didn’t claim the whole deduction. This in spite of his assertion that he wouldn’t deserve to be President if he paid one cent more in taxes than he had to. Here we see Romney assuming we are all idiots. He didn’t claim the deduction in this election year in order to make his rate seem high, knowing full well that he could refile next year, after the elections, and get the money back.

Another reason why he is a defective human being.

Recently, Romney, who once decried emergency room treatment of the medically uninsured as socialism, now tells us that it’s really OK, and would fit in just fine with his and Paul Ryan’s plan to kill universal coverage and lay a heavier cost burden on Medicare — if only they can.  (I won’t even get into Paul Ryan’s obvious human and intellectual deficiencies here.)

Can you find any reason not to say that Mitt Romney has been weighed in the balance and found wanting?

In a scathing editorial this past weekend, the economically conservative magazine the Economist took Multiple Choice Mitt Romney to task for failing to consistently explain what he believes or detail what he would do if he were elected President:

But competence is worthless without direction and, frankly, character. Would that Candidate Romney had indeed presented himself as a solid chief executive who got things done. Instead he has appeared as a fawning PR man, apparently willing to do or say just about anything to get elected. In some areas, notably social policy and foreign affairs, the result is that he is now committed to needlessly extreme or dangerous courses that he may not actually believe in but will find hard to drop; in others, especially to do with the economy, the lack of details means that some attractive-sounding headline policies prove meaningless (and possibly dangerous) on closer inspection. Behind all this sits the worrying idea of a man who does not really know his own mind.

. . . . . .

A businessman without a credible plan to fix a problem stops being a credible businessman. So does a businessman who tells you one thing at breakfast and the opposite at supper. Indeed, all this underlines the main doubt: nobody knows who this strange man really is. It is half a decade since he ran something. Why won’t he talk about his business career openly? Why has he been so reluctant to disclose his tax returns? How can a leader change tack so often? Where does he really want to take the world’s most powerful country?

While those portions of the editorial are spot on, the Economist then goes off track by claiming that this week’s Republican National Convention provides Romney with “his best chance to say what he really believes” and an opportunity “to show America’s voters that he is a man who can lead his party rather than be led by it.”  This refrain that the Convention provides the Romney with a chance to define himself and his campaign to the American people is a popular one among the chattering classes.  But it is also flatly wrong.

The reality is that we already know who Mitt Romney is – an out-of-touch politician who is either unable or unwilling to stand up to the rabid reactionaries who have taken over the GOP.  No amount of pandering, speechifying, slick videos, or pretending to be a moderate is going to change that reality.

Some moderates and even a few too many progressives continue to try to convince themselves that Romney would govern as a moderate.  But their only support for that belief is Romney’s time as Governor of Massachusetts, where it would have been impossible for Romney to win or govern if he had not acted like a moderate.  Once he left the Governor’s seat in Boston, Romney saw the writing on the wall that his party was taking a sharp rightward turn.  Rather than fight for the moderation that he needed to pursue in Massachusetts or the reality-based centrism that had been championed by his father George Romney in the 1960s, Romney time and time again joined in and encouraged the level of craziness that define today’s GOP.

As we’ve detailed previously, during the Republican Presidential primaries, Romney abandoned all sense of moderation and threw his lot in with the reactionaries.  For example, he supported Paul Ryan’s “marvelous” Austerity Budget, vowed to “get rid of” funding for Planned Parenthood, supported the Blunt Amendment, echoed the false claims of climate deniers’, explained that he wished that Robert Bork were on the Supreme Court, embraced the support of conservative firebrand Ann Coulter, declared Arizona’s harsh anti-immigration law to be a “model” for the nation, promised to veto the DREAM Act, signed the 2012 pledge of the anti-LGBT National Organization for Marriage, and vowed to abolish ObamaCare on day one of any Romney Presidential Administration.

Since it became clear that Romney would be the GOP’s nominee, some in the media continued to surmise that Romney would move to the center.  But the move never happened.  Romney hasn’t backed away from the positions he took during the primary, nor has he stood up to any of the out-of-the-mainstream groups that make up the base of today’s GOP.  Instead, the Romney campaign has refused to provide virtually any policy details because they believe that doing so would be suicidal.  But Romney did give a speech to the NRA that fed into that organization’s ridiculous conspiracy theory about President Obama’s non-existent threat to the Second Amendment, and gave the commencement address at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University which does not allow LGBT students and teaches creationism.   And most significantly, Romney granted the wish of conservative activists by picking Paul Ryan, whose reactionary attempts to abolish Medicare and privatize Social Security are matched by his social extremism, to be a heartbeat away from the Presidency.

Over the past year, Romney has shown that either: (1) Romney is a “severe conservative” who truly believes in the retrograde economic, social, and foreign policy views promoted by the reactionaries who have taken over the GOP, or (2) Romney is so lacking in principles and convictions that he is unwilling to stand up to those reactionaries.  Either way, the result is the same.  A Romney Presidency would be doing the bidding of the climate deniers, NRA conspiracy theorists, birthers, anti-immigrant nativists, anti-LGBT bigots, Medicare and Social Security privatizers, and peddlers of the failed economic and foreign policies of George W. Bush who have taken over today’s GOP. No amount of slick packaging or moderate talk during the final day of the Republican National Convention will change that reality.

If you want to make sure that Romney is never in a position to do the reactionaries’ bidding, please write a letter to your local newspaper editor about the real Mitt Romney, and sign up to volunteer for President Obama’s re-election campaign.

(By Fay Paxton, cross-posted at The Pragmatic Pundit)

At the conservative “Defending the American Dream Summit” in Washington, Grover Norquist, the Republican tax-cut Svengali said about Mitt Romney:

“All we have to do is replace Obama. …  We are not auditioning for fearless leader. We don’t need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go…. We just need a president to sign this stuff….Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States…. His job is to be captain of the team, to sign the legislation that has already been prepared.”

The summit was sponsored by Americans for Prosperity, a front group started by oil billionaire David Koch of Koch Industries.   The AFP funds the “Tea Party” and special interest groups that work against Democratic initiatives, opposing protections for workers, the environment, labor unions, health care reform, stimulus spending, and cap-and-trade legislation.

Regarding the “legislation that has already been prepared”,  perhaps you also remember ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council).  The corporate funded organization that rewrites the laws that govern our lives.  Through ALEC and the model legislation written by the organization, corporations have a voice and a vote in our daily lives.  You didn’t really believe Citizens United was an accident did you?

The Ugly Duckling

How and why do you suppose a candidate who was so poorly thought of became the celebrated nominee?  Here’s what leading Republicans have said about Romney:

Rick Santorum: “”We need someone who’s bold and courageous, someone who’s willing to go out and say, ‘I’m for these things because they are my convictions,’ not because I put a finger in the air and that’s where the public is today…..Why would we pick someone who’s had a record that is as a liberal governor of Massachusetts to lead our country at a time we need fundamental change?”

Gingrich:  “This is a campaign of people power versus money power…. He understands a lot about finance, but finance is not the free market, and Wall Street is not Main Street, and giant businesses are not small businesses.”

Michele Bachmann:  “If you look at Mitt Romney, he…has been very inconsistent on his positions. He has been on both sides of the abortion issue, on both sides of the issue of same-sex marriage.”“They (voters) want to know what’s the truth. They’re not interested in a chameleon.”

Rick Perry:  “I happen to think that companies like Bain Capital could have come in and helped these companies, if they truly were venture capitalists, but they’re not…..They’re vulture capitalists.”

Rush Limbaugh: “ Mitt Romney is not a Conservative….Romney is a flip-flopper like John Kerry was; he’s gonna be saying one thing here when he gets to the White House is gonna turn into a moderate. I can think of things, like 2006 or 2007, Romney in Massachusetts says, “I’m not a conservative Republican, I’m a moderate.”

“The Massachusetts healthcare law that then-Gov. Mitt Romney signed in 2006 includes a program known as the Health Safety Net, which allows undocumented immigrants to get needed medical care along with others who lack insurance.  Uninsured, poor immigrants can walk into a health clinic or hospital in the state and get publicly subsidized care at virtually no cost to them, regardless of their immigration status.”

Mike Huckabee:  “I think a lot of people are deceived, and you have to ask do people want to elect a president who has been dishonest in order to get the job and said things about his opponents that simply aren’t true?”

Sarah Palin:  Romney should both release his tax returns and substantiate his claim that Bain Capital created 100,000 jobs.

Senator Marco Rubio:  “There are a lot of other people out there that some of us wish had run for President, but they didn’t.”

Sheldon Adelson:  “He’s not a bold decision maker…”

Former GOP Virginia Rep. Tom Davis:  “He may not be Mr. Personality, uh, you know, this is a guy who gives a fireside chat and the fire goes out.”

Rudy Giuliani:  “I’ve never seen a guy change his position so many times, so fast, on a dime.”

Former Reagan OMB Director David Stockman:  “I don’t think that Mitt Romney can legitimately say that he learned anything about how to create jobs in the LBO (leveraged buyout) business. The LBO business is about how to strip cash out of old, long-in-the-tooth companies and how to make short-term profits. All the jobs that he talks about came from Staples. That was a very early venture stage deal. That, you know they got out of long before it got to its current size.”

David Frum:  “…..the problem is that Romney hasn’t shown backbone to stick with his positions.”

George Will:  “Romney, supposedly the Republican most electable next November, is a recidivist reviser of his principles who is not only becoming less electable; he might damage GOP chances of capturing the Senate… Republicans may have found their Michael Dukakis…”

And last but not least:

John McCain:  compiled a 200 page Romney opposition research book which is available online thanks to BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski.

Now they all support Romney for President?  Flip-flopping must be contagious. But then again, like Grover Norquist said, “….We just need a president to sign this stuff….a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen…. His job is to be captain of the team, to sign the legislation that has already been prepared.”

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Credit for Photo of Grover Norquist, head of the Americans for Tax Reform – NICHOLAS KAMM / AFP / Getty Images

Last week, President Obama and Multiple Choice Mitt Romney both gave speeches to the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (“NALEO”) in which they addressed economic and immigration issues.  In his speech, President Obama outlined the economic issues at stake in this election, explained the importance of his new DREAMers immigration policy, reiterated his call for Congress to pass the DREAM Act, and explained why we need immigration reform and a Congress that will stop obstructing such reform.

Multiple Choice Mitt, meanwhile, was in full-bore Etch-a-Sketch mode.  Romney did reiterate some of his anti-undocumented immigrant policies, saying that he would:

re-double our efforts to secure the borders – that means both preventing illegal border crossings and making it harder to illegally overstay a visa.  We should field enough border patrol agents, complete a high-tech fence, and implement and improve exit verification system.

But gone was much of the anti-immigration rhetoric that Romney spewed during the GOP primaries.  In its place was praise for legal immigration and a softer tone on undocumented immigrants.   Romney also promised a “long term solution” for DREAMers but, outside of a promise to provide a “path to legal status” for anyone who serves in the military, he offered no details as to what that “solution” would purportedly involve.

What Multiple Choice Mitt did not address in his speech is whether he still supports the reactionary anti-immigration positions that he has long espoused, or whether he is willing to support sensible and humane policies to address the status of the approximately 11.5 million undocumented immigrants who are hard-working, taxpaying residents of the US.  So, in this edition of Questions for Mitt Romney, we ask:

* Does Romney support President Obama’s DREAMers policy?  It has been more than a week since that policy was announced, and Romney still refuses to give a straight answer as to whether he supports it, though a campaign adviser says he thinks Romney would repeal it.

* Does Romney still believe that the DREAM Act should be vetoed because it is a “magnet for illegal immigration”

* At a time of limited budgetary resources, does Romney believe it is good policy for the US government to be spending an average of $23,148 of taxpayer money to deport each DREAMer?

* Does Romney support the decision of the office of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Romney’s 2008 Arizona campaign chairman to arrest a six-year-old girl on suspicion of being an undocumented immigrant?

* Does Romney still support the strategy of “self-deportation,” which seeks to make life in the US so hard for undocumented immigrants that they “voluntarily” choose to leave the country?

* Does Romney still believe that Arizona’s harsh anti-immigration law is a “model” for the nation.

* Is Kris Kobach, the virulently anti-immigrant Attorney General of Kansas who crafted the self-deportation strategy, still an adviser to the Romney campaign on immigration issues?  What role would Mr. Kobach play in a Romney Administration?

The simple reality is that Mitt Romney has a long track record of taking extreme reactionary positions on immigration issues, and during the GOP primary Romney espoused views that led blogger Steve Benen to justifiably declare Romney “the the most right-wing candidate on immigration of any competitive presidential hopeful in generations.”  Nothing about Romney’s speech to NALEO last week changes the reality that, when it comes to immigration, a Romney Presidency would be marked by extreme anti-immigration policies of self-deportation, not the sensible and humane policies demonstrated by the DREAM Act.

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Earlier editions of this series include Questions for Mitt Romney on health care reform, the NRA and guns, Jerry Falwell and Liberty University, Robert Bork, and Ann Coulter.

For this weekend’s reading list, we have stories about some of Mitt Romney’s billionaire sugar daddies, the impact of markets on our society, wrongful convictions in the US, progressive economics, and tips for evaluating the accuracy and validity of polls.

Right-Wing Billionaires Behind Mitt Romney – an overview of some of the key billionaires who are financing the SuperPACs behind Romney’s Presidential campaign, and what those billionaires are expecting to get from their campaign investments.

How Markets Crowd Out Morals – a forum about the impacts on society of the expansion of markets into virtually every aspects of our lives, and an evaluation of what the proper role of markets should be.

Exonerations in the United States – 1989-2012 – A report issued by the National Registry of Exonerations describing the 873 known exonerations of wrongfully convicted prisoners between 1989 and 2012, and identifying the key factors that likely led to the wrongful convictions to begin with.  At the Registry website, you can also find out details about each of the 873 exonerations that have occurred over that time period.

The Origins and Evolution of Progressive Economics - an interesting discussion of the origins, bases, and values of progressive economics, defined as an effort to strike “a proper balance between private and public action to ensure greater stability and equitable growth in the economy and better achieve national goals.”  This is part seven of the Center for American Progress’ seven-part Progressive Traditions series.

20 Questions a Journalist Should Ask About Poll Results - with much of the media obsessed with “horse race” type coverage of politics, we are sure to be flooded with a plethora of often conflicting poll results about campaigns and policy issues.  This handy guide provides some good suggestions regarding how to evaluate such polling results for accuracy, validity, and importance.