As reported in many quarters, including Mystery Pollster:
Last Sunday, Bush press secretary Tony Snow speculated about what polls might have shown during World War II: “If somebody had taken a poll in the Battle of the Bulge, I dare say people would have said, ‘Wow, my goodness, what are we doing here?.'”
The Bush administration is anxious to draw on American pride in the country’s victory some 60 years ago to bolster support for a war that, well, isn’t going all that well: “See,” they want to be able to say, “things looked bleak then and people were ready to quit, but it all worked out. Stick with us this time, and they’ll work out again.”
But anxiety isn’t the most productive emotion for a communicator, and lies at the heart of many disastrous PR decisions.
Like this one. As it turns out, somebody did take a poll during the Battle of the Bulge. And the results tell the opposite story from the one Snow was trying to sell:
In fact, there was a poll taken by Gallup from Dec. 31, 1944, to Jan. 4, 1945 — three years into that war and right in the middle of the bloody Battle of the Bulge, where U.S. casualties were estimated between 70,000 and 80,000. It found that 73 percent of Americans would refuse to make peace with Adolf Hitler if he offered it and that 86 percent of Americans thought there was no chance that we would lose the war in Europe.
There’s an old saw among lawyers preparing for a cross-examination: never ask a question if you don’t already know the answer. For public speakers, there’s a similar rule: never argue from a hypothetical situation unless you actually know it’s purely hypothetical. Otherwise, reality — as it has so often, and so tragically, in this war — will come back to haunt you.
