Atrios is exactly right: the anti-Hillary poll reported by the Pentagon Post is a push poll.
By definition a push poll is where you smear a named candidate and then ask what the voter thinks of that smeared candidate. Push polls are generally regarded with contempt by mainstream political analysts - unless, of course, the target of the push poll is a Democrat.
Just read this question:
Some people say (YOUR DEMOCRATIC INCUMBENT) is a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton and will support her liberal agenda of big government and higher taxes if she becomes President. If we re-elect (YOUR DEMOCRATIC INCUMBENT) they will be a rubber stamp for Clinton and will forget the values of our district.
Anyone with functioning neurons would answer no to that incredibly loaded question.
That's nothing more than the cheap anti-Democratic rhetoric used in countless rightwing TV ads created by the highly secretive media consultant Howard Finkelstein and his disciples over the past two decades. No credible poll would use that kind of rhetoric. And if it did, it would have to balance it with equivalent rhetoric in a question about the GOP frontrunner Rudy Giuliani.
Some people say (YOUR REPUBLICAN INCUMBENT) is a strong supporter of RUDY and will support his conservative agenda of corrupt government and bloodier wars if he becomes President. If we re-elect (YOUR REPUBLICAN INCUMBENT) they will be a rubber stamp for Giuliani and will forget the values of our district.
Get the picture?
At first glance, one might guess that Finkelstein himself wrote the poll. After all, he's been leading the stop-Hillary movement since 2005.
NY Post 2/8/05 (link scrubbed by the Post):
Gov. Pataki's chief political guru, Arthur Finkelstein, is planning to launch a new "Stop Her Now" Web site designed to help defeat Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in next year's election, it was learned yesterday.
The site could draw millions of dollars in anti-Clinton campaign cash from across the nation, a state GOP source said.
StopHerNow.com and StopHerNow.org are owned by Patrick Donohue, a longtime political aide to Pataki.
Clinton aide Howard Wolfson predicted that Finkelstein would run a "negative campaign of lies and distortions."
Finkelstein, a secretive and sometimes controversial national GOP consultant who played a key role in Pataki's defeat of Gov. Mario Cuomo in 1994, did not return a call seeking comment.
Fredric U. Dicker
But the poll was actually conducted by my progressive friend Celinda Lake. Why? As Atrios points out, she's working for Joe Biden.
Celinda is much better than this. So here's my theory: she threw this question into a poll for another client (the Latino Policy Coalition) just to test the theory that Biden could attack Hillary for hurting down-ballot candidates. The results were not meant for publication, but because Biden is doing miserably, his hatchet-man leaked it to the Pentagon Post so they would do his dirty work for him.
This is eminently worthy of a blogosphere investigation. First question: who is Biden's hatchet-man?
