In Georgia, pollsters had predicted Gov. Roy Barnes, the Democrat, would handily beat challenger Sonny Perdue: A Mason-Dixon poll had Barnes leading by 9 points, while one conducted by the Atlanta Constitution had him up by 11. Once the votes were counted, however, it was Perdue beating Barnes by 5 points — a humiliating 16-point air ball for the pollsters.

They were just as prescient in Colorado, where an MSNBC/Zogby poll had Democratic challenger Tom Strickland trouncing incumbent Sen. Wayne Allard 53 percent to 44 percent. In reality, Allard strolled to a relatively stress-free 5-point win — a 14-point blunder.

And in Illinois, another Zogby poll had the governor’s race pitting Republican Jim Ryan against Democrat Rod Blagojevich as a statistical dead heat — a finding that was, statistically, dead wrong. Blagojevich won, and Ryan and Zogby lost by 7 percentage points.

The pollsters’ numbers were so off the mark that even they were forced to admit the obvious. “There was a lot of bad polling this year,” acknowledged Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster. “We blew it,” said John Zogby.

As a rule, pollsters come equipped with more excuses than a married man with lipstick on his collar — and this year was no different. And whom did they point the finger of blame at most frequently? Why you and me, naturally. It seems we just didn’t turn out at the polls in exactly the configurations the pollsters thought we would — what Mr. Zogby delicately referred to as “poor turnout models.” In other words, the problems aren’t polls, it’s those damn voters who say one thing then do another. Like show up on Election Day.

In truth, the problem isn’t with us, dear voters — or even with you, dear nonvoters. The problem is with the pollsters’ inability to account for an increasingly uncooperative public. Thanks to cell phones, answering machines, caller I.D., a surfeit of polls, and a growing distaste for telephonic intrusions into our homes, it’s getting harder and harder for pollsters to find Americans willing to answer their questions. Twenty years ago, polling response rates were over 60 percent; now they are closer to 30 percent — and in some cases even lower. It’s pretty tough to get an accurate reading of the public’s opinion when the most frequent response you receive is a “click” followed by a dial tone.

So here we are in the middle of a vicious vortex. Pollsters conduct their increasingly inaccurate polls; the media then report the results as if Moses has just brought them down from the mountaintop; and our politicians tailor their messages to suit phantom voters. All the players involved in this charade understand they are acting on the flimsiest of pretenses — it’s just that relying on polls is so much easier than actually reporting or leading.

Even President Bush, who charged into office trumpeting his disdain for polls — don’t they all? — has proven to be a chronic poll watcher and poll taker. In fact, this schizophrenic stance has actually become something of an in-joke at the White House: Bush brags about not looking at polls and everyone laughs, knowing the president doesn’t have to look because Karl Rove has already whispered the results in his ear.

But allowing polling data to become a substitute for thinking has become a very wobbly crutch indeed. Just ask the Democrats who, after consulting their pollsters’ tea leaves, decided not to take on the president on tax cuts or on invading Iraq. They were forced to pay for their slavish devotion to the numbers with their political lives. Pollsters, on the other hand, are allowed to tiptoe away from the carnage their handiwork has wrought and still keep their jobs.

As long as you can sagely and entertainingly spin your numbers on the tube, there is no penalty for being wrong. As Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute wryly puts it, “It’s the sin of broadcasting in the modern age. No matter how wrong you are, the punishment is you get your own show on cable television.”

I think it’s time to change that equation — to attach some downside to the political prognosticators’ game. Perhaps we should fine pollsters $100,000 for every percentage point they are off (and create a retirement fund for pollsters who agree to leave their discredited profession). Or attach a large letter “I” (for “Inaccurate”) to the lapels of those who are wrong more than they are right. Or perhaps we can follow the lead of English soccer leagues, which regularly consign teams with losing records to second-tier divisions. And if all else fails, there is always the option of a little reverse Pavlovian training — let’s say, by attaching electrodes to pollsters’ sensitive areas on Election Night and sending a charge through them anytime a poll-based prediction proves erroneous. It would give a whole new meaning to the term “political buzz.”

If you, like me, are one of the many millions who hang up on callers wanting to know what kind of toothpaste I prefer, what TV shows I watch, or what candidates I’m going to vote for, you’ll be proud to know that you are part of a rapidly expanding segment of the population known as the “margin of error.” And if you’re not, now is the perfect time to join us and make antidemocratic polling a thing of the past.

• “First, Mr. Gingrich is truly Clintonian in all his faults.”
• “Second, before Mr. Gingrich was the ultimate insider, he was the ultimate outsider.”
• “Finally, then as now, he is a man of ideas.”

Huh. I hope the Washington Times didn’t pay a lot for this analysis, because it fails to actually explain why Mr. Gingrich could win the Republican nomination for president.

We have a flood of these “Gingrich could win!!” stories now, because, following the self-immolation of Rick Perry and Herman Cain (and, so long ago it feels like, Michele Bachmann), Gingrich now holds sudden and commanding leads in Florida and South Carolina. He’s leading in Iowa. He’s even gaining in New Hampshire.

But … so did those other losers.

Gingrich’s current surge in the polls would have to last longer than any previous pseudo-front-runner candidate’s surge did (Perry led national polls for about six weeks, Cain for less than a month) for him to still be leading the pack come January. That’s certainly possible, but so is a belated Santorum surge.

And these poll numbers would have to translate into votes, which involves well-staffed and well-funded get-out-the-vote drives — especially in the wacky caucus states. Gingrich hadn’t even bothered to open campaign offices and staff up in early states until essentially this week. He’s belatedly rehiring people who quit on him last June. These are all states, too, where Romney already has essential experience campaigning.

Romney’s at enough of a disadvantage in Iowa that any decent finish could be painted in the press as a victory, and then he’s got New Hampshire and Nevada, where he’s always been strong. (Conversely, losing New Hampshire could sink his campaign, but that’s still a distant possibility.) Santorum and Ron Paul have spent more time and resources on voter contact in Iowa than Newt could manage if he devoted himself solely to that state for the next month. (And “religious right” voters have more reason to support those two than they do serial adulterer Gingrich.)

If everything breaks for Gingrich over the next month, he could conceivably win Iowa and South Carolina and Florida, and then the nomination would be his to lose. But we’re talking about a candidate whose lack of discipline is exceeded only by that of everyone else who failed to challenge Mitt Romney for longer than a month so far this year. The closest I’ve seen to a compelling explanation of how Newt wins is Josh Marshall’s, and even he relies on sketchy intangibles (“But it seems different; it feels different”) to make the case.

If Gingrich can sustain his lead past the new year, without busting like everyone else so far … well, I imagine the White House would be thrilled.

Belief in American exceptionalism is declining, the Pew Research Center concludes in a new report:

About half of Americans (49%) and Germans (47%) agree with the statement, “Our people are not perfect, but our culture is superior to others;” 44% in Spain share this view. In Britain and France, only about a third or fewer (32% and 27%, respectively) think their culture is better than others.

While opinions about cultural superiority have remained relatively stable over the years in the four Western European countries surveyed, Americans are now far less likely to say that their culture is better than others; six-in-ten Americans held this belief in 2002 and 55% did so in 2007.

Oh no! We’re barely more nationalistic than the Germans!

What’s causing the numbers to fall? Is it the fact that many conservatives intensely hate “our culture,” on account of all the wanton postmodernism, vulgarity, hip-hop “music” and anti-family themes on prime-time television?

No. It’s because of those leftists in academia: “In the four Western European countries and in the U.S., those who did not graduate from college are more likely than those who did to agree that their culture is superior, even if their people are not perfect.”

As Corner commenter “Ed in Cary” says:

And thus is proven the corrosive effect of modern “education.” What kind of a moron believes the implied corollary to the disbelief in the superiority of any culture, which is that “all cultures are equal?”

Conservatives: Standing up for our superior American culture, by calling 51 percent of Americans morons.

Gingrich also took on healthcare policy, by repeatedly pointing out that he did not have enough time to say anything about healthcare policy, a subject about which he is known to be among the world’s foremost thinkers.

GINGRICH: Well, I just want point out, my colleagues have done a terrific job of answering an absurd question. To say in 30 seconds…

BARTIROMO: You have said you want to repeal “Obama-care,” correct?

GINGRICH: I did. Let me finish, if I may. To say in 30 seconds what you would do with 18 percent of the economy, life and death for the American people, a topic I’ve worked on since 1974, about which I wrote about called “Saving Lives and Saving Money” in 2002, and for which I founded the Center for Health Transformation, is the perfect case of why I’m going to challenge the president to seven Lincoln-Douglas style three-hour debates with a timekeeper and no moderator, at least two of which ought to be on health care so you can have a serious discussion over a several-hour period that affects the lives of every person in this country.

A book plug, an assertion of unparalleled expertise, and a hilarious proposal that makes no sense — all in one answer? He’s still got it.

I haven’t checked to see how sales of “Saving Lives and Saving Money” are looking this morning, but I am sure Gingrich was grateful for the opportunity to advertise it for free via a supposed presidential debate.

According to Politico, here’s where the campaign trail has taken candidate Gingrich today:

Hosting a town hall meeting and book signing at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport Westin Hotel

You gotta shake a lot of hands if you want to win the Detroit Metropolitan Airport Westin Hotel caucuses.

After 20 years of pretending to mull presidential bids in order to keep his name in the papers, Newt actually went through with the fake presidential bid this year in order to put his name in even more papers — and drum up business for the various schemes that keep him in diamond cuff links. (Most of his campaign staff quit because all Gingrich wanted to do was organize screenings of his documentaries.) It’s a transparent fraud from a transparent bullshit artist.

But in this environment, this year, astoundingly, it’s actually sort of working. Because Gingrich’s campaign-crippling missteps happened before those of Perry, Bachmann and Cain (in some cases up to 25 years before), he’s consolidating support from the “anyone but Romney” crowd. Real Clear Politics puts him third nationally, and his numbers have been steadily rising since September. The Mark Blumenthal “outsiders” survey has him surging among early state Republican bigwigs and for some reason he’s polling in first place in Mississippi.

The Gingrich campaign is becoming so lifelike that Bill Kristol’s Weekly Standard has gone all-in on Newt, declaring him the winner of last night’s debate, playing up his poll numbers and praising his message.

What the hell is the endgame here? There is no conceivable scenario in which Newt Gingrich is allowed to win the Republican nomination for the presidency — not with his divorces and jewelry store credit lines and history of environmentalism — but we could end up with a New Gingrich, public intellectual, who’s all the more self-satisfied and ubiquitous for having actually won a presidential primary. We all lose.

It was only in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that a majority of Americans was prepared to sacrifice civil liberties in the name of Terrorism.  But this game-playing with public opinion — falsely claiming that the public is indifferent to civil liberties in order to justify assaults on them — is common.  To this day, if you criticize President Obama for shielding Bush officials from investigations, you’ll be met with the claim that doing so was politically necessary, even though poll after poll found in the wake of Obama’s inauguration that large majorities wanted those inquiries.  Similarly, when The New York Times revealed that the Bush administration was illegally spying on the communications of Americans without the warrants required by law, Beltway pundits such as Joe Klein in unison “warned” Democrats that Americans were in favor of such measures and it would be politically suicidal to object, even though polls repeatedly showed the opposite.  The same happened when Beltway pundits repeatedly insisted that Americans opposed Congressional investigations into the U.S. Attorneys scandal even when polls showed huge majorities wanting them.

What’s striking about this latest Pew finding is that mainstream political discourse barely includes anyone making a pro-civil-liberties case.  The GOP never pretended to care, while Democrats under Obama no longer do.  Still, so engrained are these political values in Americans that a clear majority believes it is unnecessary to sacrifice them in the name of Terrorism.  That’s contrary to what one typically hears both from opponents and supporters of civil liberties alike, who often assume that Americans beileve in the need to relinquish them.

Far more surprising is this finding from Pew:

I confess to being amazed that 43% of Americans — close to a plurality — believe that “U.S. wrongdoing might have motivated attacks” by Terrorists.  I’m not amazed because it’s untrue — it plainly is true — but because that is a view almost never heard in establishment media discourse.  To the contrary, the notion that American “wrongdoing” is a cause of anti-U.S. Terrorism is one of the most rigidly enforced taboos.  Nothing provokes allegations of “unpatrotism” or “anti-Americanism” — or intellectually dishonest claims that one is “justifying” Terrorism  — more than pointing out this obvious causation.  Despite that, and despite the natural jingoistic bias of believing that one’s own country does not engage in truly bad acts (certainly not sufficiently bad to provoke Terrorism), a very sizable portion of the citizenry has come to that conclusion on its own.  That’s a very encouraging finding.

* * * * *

A few related points:

(1) The NPR segment I did yesterday with Dana Priest on Top Secret America and civil liberties can be heard here.

(2) James Bamford, the nation’s leading expert on the National Security Agency, has a must-read article on the Bush/Obama legacy of the Surveillance State.

(3) Kevin Drum has interesting observations about how those who came of age in the post-9/11 era likely believe that all sorts of radical, extreme societal attributes — including “Fortress America” — are actually normal.

“We need the leaders of our party to say, ‘Look, stop falling into the trap of the White House and focus on the real issues,’” Rove told Bill O’Reilly last night. And then he says that polling the number of birthers in the Republican Party is somehow an Obama trick, because talking about birthers “fits into the White House theme-line.”

That is patent nonsense, but it’s clever nonsense. This way, Republicans who denounce birtherism don’t have to take responsibility for the fact that Republicans allowed it to spread far and wide.

It is also in Rove’s interest to downplay the number of birthers in the party. That poll of likely GOP primary voters that showed that a staggering 51 percent of them believe the president is a foreigner? That poll is also a liberal plot:

O’Reilly decided to rebut the PPP poll by showing the results of a CBS survey taken last year. According to this poll, 20% of Americans think Obama was born abroad and 58% think he was born in this country (the rest didn’t know). Both O’Reilly and Rove seemed sanguine about this poll because, apparently, the idea that only one in five Americans is completely uninformed and another one in five cannot answer a simple question is somehow reassuring.

But as Isaac Chotiner points out, the polls do not actually contradict each other, because one is a poll of likely GOP primary voters and the other is a poll of everyone.