WASHINGTON — One of the things I liked about George W. Bush when he started running was his scorn for polling.
He expressed, again and again, his contempt for the way the Clinton White House went dialing for opinions before deciding what to do.

"I think you got to look at . . . whether or not one makes decisions based on sound principles," Mr. Bush said,
debating Al Gore. "Or whether or not you rely upon polls and focus groups on how to decide what the course
of action is. We've got too much polling and focus groups going on in Washington today."
Mr. Bush proudly toted his disgust with polls into the Oval Office.

"We don't stick our finger in the air trying to figure out which way the wind is blowing," the president told steelworkers
last August. "I do what I think is right for the American people. And we'll let the political chips fall where they may."
As it turns out, the chips are not falling quite so randomly.

The Bush White House, mirabile dictu, is giving the Clinton White House a run for its polling money. Karl Rove,
a master of nasty push-polling for tobacco companies and politicians (the kind used to destroy John McCain
in the South Carolina primary), devours polls as rapaciously as Dick Morris.

As George Stephanopoulos wrote in his memoir, Mr. Morris lived by a "60 percent" rule:
If 6 out of 10 Americans were in favor of something, Bill Clinton had to be, too.

In the new Washington Monthly, Joshua Green reveals the extent of Bush polling: Republican records show
that  "Bush's principal pollsters received $346,000 in direct payments in 2001. Add to that the multiple boutique
polling firms the administration regularly employs for specialized and targeted polls and the figure is closer to $1 million."

(That's about half as much as Mr. Clinton spent his first year,
but about $1 million more than Mr. Bush led us to expect he'd spend.)

"But while Clinton used polling to craft popular policies," Mr. Green points out,
"Bush uses polling to spin unpopular ones — arguably a much more cynical undertaking."

The nadir of Bill Clinton's presidency was when he asked Dick Morris to poll on whether he should tell the truth
about Monica Lewinsky. But by that point he had already turned the ideal of the presidency upside down, letting
arithmetic trump integrity as he painted his policies, principles and even his family vacations by the numbers.
With the mathematical monkey on his back, he had to sell the Lincoln Bedroom to pay Mr. Morris to keep
massaging the lead over Bob Dole.

The former president is still a courtesan to public opinion. Asked by Newsweek if he regretted the Marc Rich pardon,
he says he wouldn't have done it if he had foreseen the damage to his reputation. But the cheesy Clinton obsession with
polling seems positively uplifting compared with the black arts of the Bush polling operation.

At least Mr. Clinton's impulse was democratic. He yearned to do what we wanted him to do — he was Sally-Field-desperate for us to really, really like him. Mr. Bush's impulse is autocratic. He wants to do what he (or Cheney & Rove) wants to do — and is desperate only to find a way to shove it down our throats.

Mr. Rove polls for the magic-button phrases and rationales that will persuade the middle class to help the rich get richer and build a mandate for smog from sea to oil-slicked sea.

Mr. Bush used poll-dictated phrases to reduce alarm about his Social Security plan, talking about "retirement security" and "choice," as opposed to the Democrats' "bankrupt" and "risky."

It seemed risible when pollsters were tripping over each other in the Clinton White House. Mark Penn set up an office
in the closet of another aide's West Wing office. But at least the Clintonites were upfront about their addiction to addition.
The Bush method is all denial and secrecy, just like its energy plan. The president's pollsters, Jan van Lohuizen and
Fred Steeper, are kept in a secure location — the very distant background.

Aides to Mr. Bush have spent the seven months since the terrorist attacks telling us about his "resolute" grit as a leader.
Now we must wonder, every time they reiterate that the president is "focused," whether the word was focus-grouped.