Coworkers who live in Baltimore long ago disabused me of the notion that being a journalist will get you out of jury duty. I remember one woman I used to work with serving on multiple juries.
Still, when I get one of those calls from an opinion pollster, I've always been able to wriggle off the hook by telling him or her that I work for a media company. So it caught me off guard Monday evening when the caller told me that my employment didn't disqualify me from the poll she was taking.
And so I ended up answering the woman's questions, which she posed in a monotone that had me convinced for a while that this was actually an automated survey.
She asked me about my take on the U.S. political climate generally, and in particular about the politics of the economy and the debate over the debt ceiling. Some people are glad to cooperate with these things, happy that someone actually cares about their opinions.
Polls hold no such allure for me, but at the same time I have a degree of sympathy for the people who take them.
While I was working my way through college, I had a job for a while with a market-research outfit, calling people to ask them about their preferences in toothpaste and political candidates. It was imperative that I keep the respondent on the line throughout the entire survey, or none of the responses would be valid. The job depended on getting complete sets of answers, and getting them usually took 20 minutes minimum.
So when the woman who called me Monday said, "and, finally, I'd like to ask you about ..." for the fourth time, it was not a surprise.
No, the curious thing was a series of questions in which she asked whether a particular quote from President Obama would make me "much more likely, somewhat more likely, no more likely, somewhat less likely or much less likely " to vote for him next year, or similarly how statements attributed to the GOP leadership in Congress would affect the likelihood that I'll vote Republican in 2012.
My answer to every one — as it should be for every thinking person, no matter one's political persuasion — was "no more likely." Think about it. Why should what someone says make any difference. Isn't it what a politician does — deeds, not rhetoric — that matters?