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Yahoo!On Tuesday, January 20, Barack Hussein Obama will be sworn in as the 44th president of the United States of America, a transition to power that brings with it a trainload of pressing problems screaming for solutions. Unless you have imitated Rip Van Winkle for the past eight years, you already know this. What may be a surprise are some results from a post-election poll, “What Americans Expect from the Next President and Congress,” conducted by Zogby International at the behest of UC Santa Barbara’s Walter Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion and Public Life and author Jim Lichtman.
Released last month by Capps Center director Wade Clark Roof and Lichtman, a member of the center’s national advisory board, the poll underscored how much American voters yearn for leaders who are honest, principled, and intelligent, and who will speak truth to them. It also showed a disconnect between what respondents say are the primary actions the new president and the Congress should take (fix the economy, end the Iraq War, and expand healthcare) and what they think must be done to “get the country back on track” (lower taxes and cut government spending).
More on these results later. However, it is interesting that, unlike most public opinion polls, this one did not set up pre-selected choices or categories for respondents’ answers. It posed three open-ended questions and gave the online respondents space in which to write anything they chose. Zogby staff selected 3,357 demographically representative likely voters to quiz on November 4-5, and received 10,081 total responses, producing a survey with a plus-or-minus 1.7 percent margin of error.
The questions and top responses were:
1. What one or two qualities do you think the country needs most from the new president? Answers: honesty (18%); integrity (12%); leadership (12%); and “other” (58%). Note: Among the “other” qualities were transparency, experience, conservatism, strength, fairness, compassion, unity, and common sense.
2. What one or two actions would you like to see accomplished most by the new president and Congress? Answers: fix/stabilize economy (65%); end Iraq War (19%); fix healthcare (15%); and “other” (1%).
3. What one or two words best describe what you think the new president needs to do to get the country back on track? Answers: lower taxes (62%); cut government spending (17%); keep taxes at present level (13%); and “other” (8%).
Business as usual was unacceptable to this cross-section of U.S. voters, 34 percent of whom self-identified as conservative, very conservative, or libertarian. Another 43 percent described their ideology as moderate, while more than 21 percent said they were liberal or progressive. “The results show how out of step the Bush administration was with the rest of the country,” observed Roof. “A vote for President-elect Obama really was a vote for change.”
Lichtman worked with Roof, who is a professor of religious studies, in shaping the questions on voter expectations. He tallied answers to the three questions by using a keyword search on the Zogby poll’s anonymous database. He has also read most of the survey’s 10,000 responses, and expects to mine them for future columns to be published on his Web site, Ethics Stupid, where a copy of the poll results is posted.
The most unusual result to Lichtman was the emphasis on cutting taxes. When asked if that did not contradict the action goals of fixing the economy and expanding healthcare coverage, he said respondents might have figured the money saved by ending the Iraq War would pay for some of the other programs.
To Roof, the apparent contradiction is more likely the result of “a fundamental inconsistency in Americans’ thinking” and the fact that polling captures surface answers and misses deeper nuances. “They are not commenting on tax policies,” he noted, “and cutting taxes and spending are easy things to say.” He thinks the actual message in this part of the poll was to use taxes wisely and, if they must be raised, “Tax the rich but not me.”
Both Roof and Lichtman see high public expectations for the new president, especially to lead the nation with integrity, intelligence, and with a maximum possible degree of transparency. But they also see Americans willing to cut President-elect Obama some slack so long as he levels with them.
“People know that he operates in a political system,” said Roof, “and politics in Washington can be a nasty business. So he won’t be able to deliver everything he wants. They do expect honesty and integrity from him; that is what he must maintain to keep the public’s support.”
Another survey is planned after President Obama’s first 100 days to measure how well he is living up to Americans’ expectations, so stay tuned.
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