Spectral lines: The age of the survey

“The American People appear to be losing confidence in President Carter's ability to restore trust in government, according to the latest quarterly New York Times/CBS News poll,” the Times reported on its front page recently. The ultimate implications resident in this and other outputs of the quarterly poll were left largely to the reader. Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and even Dwight Eisenhower had neither the benefits nor the disadvantages of frequent polls like these. Such surveys, and others like them, test today's political leaders' sagacity and intestinal fortitude in exploiting or surviving them.