Thoughts on polling
In reflecting on polling, Holshouser offers his thoughts on what politicians owe their constituents. In the case of North Carolina, Holshouser believes that the state's residents deserve a working public school system, good roads, fair taxes, and good jobs. He learned this through a "pretty amateurish" polling operation. Despite this wide mandate, Holshouser says he believes in limited government.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with James E. Holshouser Jr., January 31, 1998. Interview C-0328-1. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- JACK FLEER:
-
We've got you elected and I wanted to talk about several
different roles that a governor plays, if you don't mind that
word, as governor. And the first role that I want to talk about with you
is your role as a public leader. I have in mind here the idea of a
governor's relationship with the general public either
directly or through the media. And what I would like to do is asked you
to think about those situations where you want to find out what the
people of the state want you to do as governor. How do you go about
doing that?
- JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER, JR.:
-
Well I tell you Jack I have the feeling that most people who run for
governor run with their own ideas about what they want to do for the
state. I think that is what is going to be what drives them. If all of
us are honest, I think we will convince ourselves that if that is not
what the public really wants that's, because they just
don't know as much as we do. Now you can do polls and as I
told you we didn't have much money. We set up a very
jerry-rigged kind of polling operation where we
had people in each county get a half of a dozen of folks together once a
month and either do the required number of calls or the required number
of houses of this kind of household or that kind of household and we
started that during the campaign and it worked very well and we
continued that during the four years of office. So we had the most
amateurish and yet at the same time pretty accurate polling operation
during the whole time. You would ask questions about issues that were on
the front burner. But if you get right down to it I think the public has
a right to expect the state government leadership to see that it has a
good public school system and that includes higher education as well and
the community colleges. That it has good roads to drive on. That it
doesn't tax them to death. And that it does as much as it can
to help them have good jobs. The last is much more limited than the
other two because you are not directly hands on in providing those jobs
except in the public sector. Now the public also has a right and they
are different, everybody says they want a good environment but when you
get down to what people mean by that there are a lot of different views.
I think the government has a role to play in seeing that the environment
within the state is healthy. I am still basically a believer in the
Abraham Lincoln theory that government ought to do for those folks only
those things that they can't do as well for themselves. I
just know at the time Lincoln said that there were a lot of things that
didn't need government at that point that may need government
today.