I interviewed a presidential candidate once, long before he declared he was running for the Vice Presidency. He said that all the things he does as part of the Senate, his sense of right and wrong, these were based on surveys. He is a creature of surveys, he said, he uses it to measure the public pulse, and makes his moves based on it.

And as if to prove how good he was at this, he claimed that he predicted the outcome of the vice-presidential race of 2010.