Inside the Beltway

Bubba’s mind

Perhaps it should have been titled “The Former First Family Meets the Shrink.”

That’s the subject matter of an intriguing new book, “The Clintons Meet Freud: A Psychohistory of Bill, Hillary and Chelsea,” written by psychiatrist Dr. Paul Lowinger.

The book examines former President Bill Clinton’s “unconscious mind and personality according to the methods of Freud and Jung,” the book’s publisher tells us. “Clinton’s sadomasochism, narcissism, Oedipus complex, fear of death and his sexuality are central to the story of his accomplishments and mistakes.”

Dr. Lowinger, who worked 40 years in the psychiatry field and has written extensively on mental health in China, wrote this book because he was fascinated by the relationship between the Clintons’ quest for social justice and their opportunism and was unable to “stop wondering what Freud would have said about the Clintons.”

Fool findings

Been polled yet about your choice for president in the 2004 election?

Herewith some sound advice before you agree to participate with the “pollster.” First, knowing the person or firm that’s conducting the poll will tell you about its quality.

“Polls are conducted by well-known national polling firms, as well as by other, far less-skilled companies,” says the Voter’s Guide to Election Polls, written by Michael W. Traugott and Paul J. Lavrakas, the latter a senior methodologist for Nielsen Media Research.

The polls conducted by the less experienced prompted campaign consultant Harrison Hickman to observe: “Any fool can become a pollster, and many have.”

Secondly, the authors point out that many news organizations — newspapers to television and radio stations — “are enamored of polls as a news source.” How’s this a problem?

In this age of modern technology, “one can disseminate an awful lot of bad data very quickly … to the news business,” warns the guide, which says it is the responsibility of reporters “to serve as gatekeepers for data quality.”

Finally, don’t put a lot of weight in telephone “call-in” polls or Internet polling.

“Similar to audience call-in polls … Internet pop-up polls are unreliable,” says the guide. “There is no way to know anything about the representativeness of the ‘sample’ of respondents who fill out the set of questions and thus their value as a source of information about election preferences or other public opinion is essentially zero.”

Story Continues →