Leadership on issues is not done by focus groups. Surely we do need to get the pulse on things and focus group let us know if we are saying things understandably, but that does not mean we cave in.

I go back to John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Address (1961) and he speaks to this,

To those peoples in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required-not because the Communists are doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If the free society cannot help the many who are poor, it can never save the few who are rich.

emphasis mine

Articulating clearly, the antithesis of what later would be called Reaganomics, Kennedy understood that leadership was not the result of focus groups, though he was wise enough to know which issues had to be fought for.

To tailor message to mass market appeal is not the hallmark of a leader, it is the stock and trade of the propagandist - the manipulator who seeks to rule through spin.

Conservative have a home court advantage. The conservative view is that things should stay as they are. Progressives have to make the case for change.

The part that is ironic is, in the midst of all the conservative rhetoric, the changes they have brought to the Republic are monumental. The progressives, for all their talk of change, are playing the old cards.

The value of the data is to learn how to weave messages that will get people to vote against their own best interests.

If there ever were leadership of the caliber of JFK, we would see a very different political landscape and a much more interesting election.

We'll see if that will ever come to pass again.

What people are failing to see is that not only will the data be for "Their Eyes Only" it will also be used to set the agenda and tone of the Democratic Party.

In the great debate about how Democrats can stage a comeback (beyond simply waiting for the coming Republican implosion that never seems to arrive), American Environics rejected some of the more popular recommendations out there. Rather than focusing on reframing the Democratic message, as Berkeley linguistics and cognitive science professor George Lakoff has recommended, or on redoubling Democratic efforts to persuade Americans to become economic populists, as another school of thought suggests, the American Environics team argued that the way to move voters on progressive issues is to sometimes set aside policies in favor of values. By focusing on “bridge values,� they say, progressives can reach out to constituents of opportunity who share certain fundamental beliefs, even if the targeted parties don’t necessarily share progressives’ every last goal. In that assessment, Shellenberger and Nordhaus are representative of an increasingly influential school of thought within the Democratic Party.

By the beginning of fall 2005, American Environics had presented its data to key Democratic leaders and a who’s who of Democratic interest groups: Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, the NDN (formerly the New Democratic Network), Third Way, Planned Parenthood, the Center for American Progress, People for the American Way, the Economic Policy Institute, and OMB Watch. They did so quietly, swearing their viewers to silence. (They will be releasing the data publicly early in 2006.) Few media outlets saw the presentations, but the Prospect was given an early copy of their research.

The data contradicted the slew of polls that show Americans to be strong supporters of Democratic issue positions, such as universal health care, despite voting habits that have made Republicans the dominant political actors. Instead, American Environics’ extensive plumbing of Americans’ attitudes laid out a darker, more nuanced vision of what the nation actually believes. Far from being a purely dour assessment, though, in it can be found the seeds of a new understanding of the interrelationship of culture, the economy, and politics -- broadly defined -- that should give progressives hope.

It just so happens that data collected by Mr. Mary Maitlin polling firm says that Democrats should be more like Republicans and no one is interested in their issues and ideologies.

HOW FUCKING CONVENIENT!!!!

The new data have convinced even the most skeptical that an approach that worked in the industrial age is not as suited to the new, globalized information-era economy, where isolated voters look first at character as they assess candidates. Last August, for example, the Democracy Corps political polling firm released a memo that sharply diverged from the firm’s usual reports on such generic Democratic concerns as jobs, prescription drug benefits, and heath insurance. In focus groups held among rural voters in Wisconsin and Arkansas, as well as disaffected Bush voters in Kentucky and Colorado, pollsters Karl Agne and Stanley Greenberg found that concerns about a stagnant economy, job security, health-care costs, and the war in Iraq were consistently trumped by questions of values. [ARE YOU BEGINNING TO GET THE PICTURE]

“[A]s powerful as the concern over [economic] issues is, the introduction of cultural themes -- specifically gay marriage, abortion, the importance of the traditional family unit, and the role of religion in public life -- quickly renders them almost irrelevant in terms of electoral politics at the national level,� Agne and Greenberg wrote. “Particularly among non-college educated voters, cultural issues not only superseded other concerns, they served as a proxy for many voters on those other issues.�

When it came to defining themselves in the nation’s ongoing cultural battles -- such as the battle over “family values� -- Democrats had virtually ceded the field to Republicans, presenting an uncertain face to the public. Voters, the research showed, were looking to cultural and lifestyle markers to determine whether or not a candidate was, in fact, going to do right by the economy, the Democrats’ one persistently strong area. The Democracy Corps pollsters concluded that voters saw traditional Democratic economic concerns as having little to do with them, being mainly “manifested in costly government social programs or political alliances with labor unions and minorities.� The party’s inattentiveness to cultural matters had, paradoxically, left these voters with “absolutely no sense that Democrats have a viable alternative vision that would truly promote broad economic growth or increased prosperity for working Americans.�

In otherword "He who owns the data gets to make shit up"