PPP’s Cheese Puff Polling on Palin

I once found myself in a conversation with a group of contract engineers comparing the strangest projects they’d ever worked on. The competition came down to the guy who was the engineer on the Smurf Berry Crunch line and the one who had worked making Cheese Puffs. I don’t remember who won. What stuck with me was the term of art used by those who made Cheese Puffs to refer to the product they sold to the world – they called it ‘the vehicle.’  The vehicle is not the Cheese Puff, it’s only the part we think of as the Cheese Puff – the short length of extruded corn cellulose that is the literal and nutritional equivalent of an organic packing peanut.

But if you only have the vehicle, you don’t have a Cheese Puff. The reason you can’t eat just one is because of ‘the powder’ – the neon-yellow-not-found-in-nature stuff that clings to the outside of the vehicle. Thus the name ‘vehicle’ – it is only there to transport the powder to your palate and convince you to eat the bag you have and then to buy another one. Don’t get me wrong – I can still be induced to eat a few occasionally, but after that hearing how they were made I never again confused them with food. I think of them as what they are: packing peanuts with tasty yellow powder on them.

Public Policy Polling, the North-Carolina-based see of CEO and consistent Democrat donor Dean Debnam has perfected the political research equivalent of this culinary materpiece. The latest example is not one of their entrée offerings, just a light snack. PPP serves a massively Democrat clientelle that love what they serve up and keep coming back for more. They pride themselves on ‘highly accurate polling’ but that’s not the secret to their success. It’s not the packing peanut, it’s the powder. Like other tendentious pollers they specialize in identifying the narrative that appeals to their customers’ palate and then crafting just the right empty vehicle to deliver it with the imprimatur of scientific fact.

The latest such puff piece produced by PPP’s Tom Jensen is innocuous enough after extrusion: he correlates the category of ‘Birther’ with support for various political candidates. Among those who identify themselves as doubting the president’s native-born status, Sarah Palin tops the list of favorability at 66%. That tells you – well... that, and little more.

But it’s not the peanut that sells, it’s the powder. Tom pours it on with the gusto of one who knows his customers and his CEO: ‘Them birthers sure like them some Sarah Palin.’ The logic is thus: all people with doubts about Obama’s status are ignorant rednecks (‘Birthers’); Sarah Palin tops their list of supported candidates; ergo, only ignorant rednecks support Sarah Palin. Or as one astute cheese puff lover with yellow-stained fingers puts it in his comments, this poll proves that ‘Sarah Palin is an idiot and so are her supporters.’

But, you say, ‘the data of the poll doesn’t support that.’ You’re looking at the peanut. That’s not where the value lies. Another commenter gets the message nicely, congratulating Tom on accurately ‘identifying’ a ‘major Republican demographic’. But that powder was made long before the peanut, and was sitting around PPP in 50 gallon drums just waiting for a vehicle to carry it out to be savored and mistaken for nutritious substance. Sell the powder by itself and you’re simply a bigot who despises Sarah Palin supporters as uneducated ignoramuses on no evidence. Spread a bit of that same neon-yellow confection on an ‘accurate’ poll that provides no such data and voila, it’s proven fact.

Indeed, Tom’s poll tells us absolutely nothing about who these people actually are, which would be interesting and useful and could even reinforce his bigotries if PPP was honest enough to test them. To deliver that tasty bit, he simply applies the cheesy wisdom conventional among PPP customers that on a line drawn between Sarah Palin and the ‘Birthers,’ there stands nothing but stump-toothed, banjo wielding characters from Deliverance. And it doesn’t hurt that an extra whiff of savory cheese ketones can be added by silently insinuating that Governor Palin is included in this ‘Birther’ ‘demographic.’ She is not. She has never publically questioned the natural-born-citizen status of the president.

I like the occasional not-found-in-nature snack. I fairly swoon at the sight of stale Peeps. But I don’t confuse them with food or try to run my body on them. Not so the eager diners at Brasserie PPP. They will take an early cab and line up with their friends to pay midtown prices for a silver-covered dish brought out by a flock of dinner jacketed waiters containing a single curvaceous, neon-yellow confection, never suspecting that what they are savoring has no substance whatsoever. A pleasurable snack on occasion, but not something to run the body politic on.

A political movement fed on such trivialities is liable to grow lethargic, unhealthy, and narcissistic. Imprecise thinking about one’s opponents, particularly that fueled by lazy bigotry, rarely produces effective political strategies. And yellow-finger revolutions rarely outmuscle the ones fed on real red meat.

Thanks to Joseph Russo at C4P pointing this out