The only reason I ask is that on today's WSJ opinion page, Caddell and Schoen write a piece announcing how unseemly and disturbing it is that liberals have been criticizing pollster Scott Rasmussen. (You don't say.) For Caddell and Schoen, the polling criticism indicates a “disturbing attitude toward dissent” and is akin to “intimidation.”

In other words, it's all very bad and liberals should stop [emphasis added]:

As pollsters for two Democratic presidents who served before Barack Obama, we view this unprecedented attempt to silence the media and to attack the credibility of unpopular polling as chilling to the free exercise of democracy.

“Unprecedented”? Oh brother.

So again I'll ask, did Pat Caddell and Douglas Schoen slumber through the Bush years, because what they may have missed was the fact that right-wing bloggers and activists routinely and emphatically attacked polls that they didn't like; they demeaned and insulted pollsters for producing “bias” and “skewed” results if those results were not sufficiently pro-Bush.

Right-wing poll bashing was an epidemic, but I don't remember hearing boo from Caddell or Schoen. Plus, the right-wing attacks were often wildly dishonest and factually inaccurate, unlike most of the criticism being leveled at Rasmussen today.

There's nothing wrong with Caddell and Schoen sticking up for their polling pals. But why didn't they do it during the Bush years?