If the media have wanted you to know one thing about the campaign lately, it’s this: Bob Dole’s post-convention “bounce” in the polls doesn’t mean much. This has always been true of such “bounces” — that they can be artificial and short-lived — but opinion-makers have bent over backwards to ensure that you understand it is especially true this time.
In the Washington Post, Richard Morin was exhaustively and ostentatiously dismissive of the “notoriously contradictory” surveys of the ” convention season.” He hauled out several experts to admonish gullible Americans to beware: We should “take a brief vacation from poll-watching” because these Republican-encouraging polls “are seductive.” Morin is, by the way, a pollster. In the New York Times, Janet Elder warned, “The polls have to be considered in the context of a busy convention stretch, one that has not yet concluded.”
All of this is of course correct — 100 percent. But the media weren’t nearly so punctilious last time around, when Bill Clinton departed his convention in Atlanta. “Convention Gives Bill Clinton a Big Bounce,” ran a Times headline — the “greatest convention bounce in half a century.” Wrote David S. Broder in the Post, “Judging from the ‘bounce’ [Clinton and Gore] got in the polls, the [convention] effort was a success.” And that same Richard Morin began an article this way: “Did somebody say bounce? Michael Jordan should bounce so high. Bump? Redskins linebackers should bump so hard.”
To be sure, all of these journalists issued caveats. But there was nothing like the cold water poured Niagara-like on the polls that followed Bob Dole’s moment in the San Diego sun.
