The more things change...

...the more different they get, sometimes.

During the debates, Bush was boasting (though why he thought it was a subject to brag about is a bit of a puzzle to me) that Iraqis were posting higher "right track" numbers than Americans in the polls.

Steven Moore, political consultant to luminaries ranging from Boris Yeltsin to Arnold Swharzenegger, was the apparent source of some of that data. Writing in the LA Times yesterday, Moore noted...

I was there from July 2003 to April 2004, conducting about 70 focus groups and a dozen public opinion polls and advising L. Paul Bremer III, then the civilian administrator, on Iraqi public opinion. Whatever you might hear from Kerry, Michael Moore, the mainstream media and anyone else to whom defeating President Bush is more important than the fate of the Iraqi people, those who know best what's going on in Iraq — the Iraqis themselves — are optimistic about the future.

I'm not sure what his methodology might have been, but it seems it wasn't face to face interviews, since he admits elsewhere that...

I was in Iraq for nine months myself, and your analysis of a Westerner's life resonates. I was confined to my hotel for much of the time, and felt my freedoms erode as I became increasingly hunted.

...although he persists in this claim.

After nine months doing a dozen or so polls and about seventy focus groups in 13 Iraq cities, I defer to those who have the most information on Iraq's future - the Iraqi people. And they are optimistic.

Or were, perhaps.

If Mr. Moore had been able to get outside his room a bit more, he might have noticed that there was a war on over there, and wars rarely provide the conditions for static opinion. When they go well, optimism increases, and when they go poorly, well, stuff like this happens...

More Iraqis say their country is headed in the wrong direction and they blame the poor security situation, a new poll has found.

USA Today offers some findings more recent than Moore's.

•Wrong direction. Forty-five percent of Iraqis said the country is headed in the wrong direction compared with 39% when the United States transferred political power to a caretaker Iraqi government in June. Sixty-three percent blamed "poor security" as the reason.

In June, 51% said the country was heading in the right direction. That is down to 42%. That number started going down around the time that U.S. and Iraqi forces were fighting to oust insurgents loyal to rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr from Najaf, a city that is holy to Shiite Muslims, who are the majority in Iraq .

•Concerns. Asked to name the most important issues to them, every Iraqi surveyed named security; 80% said the economy; 58% said quality of life; and 38% said politics. When asked to rank specific issues, they listed unemployment, crime and infrastructure in the top three. More people singled out crime as their first concern.

Thirty-three percent blamed problems on U.S.-led forces in Iraq, and 32% blamed foreign terrorists.

•Future leaders Al-Sadr, whose militia has battled U.S. forces in Baghdad and the Shiite south, has the biggest name recognition in the country at 88%, edging out Ayad Allawi, the U.S.-backed caretaker prime minister, whose name was recognized by 86%. More Iraqis said they would vote for Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of a religious party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, than for Allawi.

Of course, Paul Bremer didn't commission the new poll...