When you say 'Vision', do you mean 'Imagination'?

The Madoff shocker made us realize that anything, really anything, is possible when it comes to brazen theft these days. So it should not come as a surprise if the next scandale du jour turns out to involve the lucrative polling business.
The nerdy, wonky and dustily serious FiveThirtyEight.com website—a number-laden refuge for many of us during last year’s election campaign—has called out Strategic Vision, LLC, a Republican polling firm, in very specific terms with accusations that its numbers are invented. Wowie zowie, not ‘skewed’, ‘unreliable’, ‘biased’ or ‘built on flimsy methods’, but COMPLETELY MADE UP. It’s pretty much saying that CEO David Johnson, a regular talking head on cable TV (most recently to debunk Jimmy Carter’s comment about racism and Obama), is a Madoffian fraudmeister.

Strategic fed the political gossip mills last fall with insights like this August 30, 2008 revelation:

‘Strategic Vision polling in the key battleground states of Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida and non-traditional battleground states such as New Jersey indicate that 25% to 35% of Hillary Clinton supporters will not vote for Barack Obama and might consider voting for John McCain based upon his running mate’. Yeah, right.

SV is also a PR firm and showcased on its Facebook page client Michael Glassman, author of Outdoor Designs for Living, who ‘offers multiple cooking options when building outdoor rooms’. Hey, one day presidential politics, next day patio furniture.

Nate Silver, who runs FiveThirtyEight, combed through some of Strategic’s results and found them highly dubious. He highlights the test Strategic gave 1,000 Oklahoma high school students of whom NOT ONE could correctly answer all ten softball questions about American history and government, like the names of the two major political parties and who is in charge of the executive branch. Only six of the 1,000 kids even managed to score 70%.

Now, although one can never underestimate the ignorance of any group of people, I’m sure Oklahoma is full of teens smart as whips who DO know which ocean is on the east coast of the United States (one of the ten questions), even if they miraculously were missed in this polling exercise.

But the idea that only one in four kids registering a heartbeat would know that George Washington was the first president is a bit of a stretch. You’d think a Republican polling firm would drum up results like that for a place like, say, northern California or Vermont.

The latest update on Strategic is the revelation that its corporate headquarters is located in a motel in a Georgia hamlet near the Chattahoochee National Forest, an address shared with the county headquarters of the Republican Party.

Silver must be slavering to be slapped with a libel lawsuit, which would open up discovery and enable him to demand business records of actual telephone polling allegedly performed by the offended company. If said lawsuit is not forthcoming very shortly, expect to see a lot less of Mr Johnson on the cable shows. He’ll be very busy keeping his ass out of a sling—and not in a good way.