The Republican pollster Frank Luntz -- the ineffable Frank Luntz, the one, the only, whose Clintonesque advice to Republicans has often been reported in these pages ("Frank Luntz Does It for the Children," Sept. 22, et seriatim) -- gave an interview to Capital Style magazine recently. We highly recommend it to all those Republicans, particularly in Congress, who have lately taken to spouting focus-group-approved Luntzisms as their primary mode of communicating with voters ("It's about the future. It's about the children").
Luntz approaches his work, he told Capital Style, "from a Peter Sellers mode. I've actually studied him. I've studied all his characters. By the time he died, he did not exist. He only existed in character. And what scares me a little bit is that I don't exist as much as I did two years ago.
"I am a focus group. I can synthesize for you: After I get out of a focus group, I, Frank Luntz, cease to exist, and I become those 12 people in the focus group.
"Look," Luntz adds, "there is no truth and there is no reality." As a description of politics as practiced by Bill Clinton, this little aphorism can't be topped. But do Republicans really want to make it their motto, too?