[Moshineko]

Lucky bastard, Blumenthal is great. He's on NPR quite a bit, and always has some very interesting things to say.

Now, for polling, look at a few things:

What are the questions?
If they are worded correctly, the questions can be fairly representative of an actual view. Questions like "Is Obama a terrorist?" are not appropriate questions, nor are they usually asked by decent pollers.
It is more likely that they will ask a series of questions about the subject, none of which actually come out and ask the poll-taker to give a socially unacceptable answer, but which will tell the pollsters the true opinion of the poll-taker, anti-social or not.

For instance, rather than "Is Obama a terrorist?", one might ask "Do you associate the name 'Hussein' with negative, positive, or neutral events?", "Is a candidate's name important to their campaign?", "Is your view of the Democratic stance on Iraq favorable, unfavorable, or neutral?", and so on. Using the answers to these questions, one can come up with a set of data that supports many conclusions, most of which are likely accurate.

Which brings the second question. Who is giving the poll? What is their goal?
If you see a poll by Reuters, you're probably okay. They're known for an almost unbaised polling procedure, and have no (obvious) underlying motives for skewing data. If your poll was taken by a Christian organization, watch out for that bias. If Democratic, watch out for a bias against Republicans. In the West, a bias against Muslims, and so on. Know your source, as always.

What is the poll set?
Most polls now suffer from a poor polling set. The people who take these polls are usually elderly, as they're the only ones who will sit still long enough for a decent poll. Other than that, you have very motivated, and thus biased, subjects answering, or people who pop in on the crap, one-question, "Is Bush dumb?" online polls.
If you can find a decent number of people, and a fairly varied group, you might be okay. Don't do that, and your poll is crap. For instance, in the Spring semester at my college, we had a speaker talk to us about counselors' and psychologist's views on having an interpreter in a session, for deaf or deaf-blind patients. The conclusions were based on a polling of one hundred and eight psychologists and counselors. Immediately, it was apparent that the data had no relevance at all. Taking a percentage out of such a small group means that minorities and outliers are likely to skew your data by an unrealistic amount. If one of them had set an interpreter on fire, the data would show that 10% of counselors will set interpreters on fire. Probably not a good indicator of actual opinions.

So, the question isn't "are polls accurate", but rather "which polls are accurate". For that, you need to know a bit about the poll and pollsters in question. It's likely that most of the polls you see are accurate for their data set, it's just that data set that's in question. Human nature dictates that we'll usually hedge our answers, so as not to be caught out in the future, or told off for an unfavorable answer, so it's unlikely that any poll will ever be truly accurate. But then, that's where the margin of error comes in, of course, and the skill of the pollsters.