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risky votes 14 months before the next congressional elections.
• "I can't understand the White House these days," said Rep. Jim Moran, D-Va., an early and enthusiastic endorser of a strike against Syria over last month's chemical weapons attack. Rather than unexpectedly asking for Congress' blessing on Aug. 31, Moran said, Obama might have quietly called House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi to say, "'I'm thinking of sending this vote to the Congress. How do you think it might turn out?'"
• "She would have said, 'You've got to be kidding,'" Moran said. "She knows where the votes stand."
• In recent days, Obama put military decisions on hold and asked Congress to halt plans to vote on a strike authorization while diplomats explore Russia's proposal to put Syria's chemical weapons under international control. The pause has given the president's friends time to ponder why Congress, and especially the House, seemed to be moving against his push for military action against Syria's government.
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DIGITS: Mistrust, changing culture challenge a polling industry battered by accuracy questions
• A new survey highlights the two-front problem facing the polling industry: People don't trust polls, and many say they are unlikely to want to participate in them.
• Let's take trust first. The Kantar survey, conducted to assess how people view polls, shows that 75 percent of Americans think most polls they hear about are biased toward a particular point of view.
• But Americans differentiate polls based on their source. Most say they trust polls from nonpartisan foundations and academic centers, slightly fewer trust polls from polling companies or news media organizations, and even fewer have faith in those from political parties or candidates.
• These two findings combined -- broad questions about the veracity of polling coupled with greater trust in sources that seem to prioritize scientific methods -- suggest that Americans take a savvy approach to polling.
• And in two key ways, they're right. Not every poll is worthy of trust, and there probably are more "biased" polls out there than unbiased ones.
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