For years, there was a certain telephone commercial that had me by the throat. I am talking about that damp little melodrama involving a middle-aged black woman sitting in a chair as she receives her first phone call from her son, newly arrived to his dorm in college. I simply had to watch it. I was talking to in order to experience this tiny emotional whippet. Now I see that it wasn't merely the surface sentimentality of the mother-son bond that was plucking my heartstrings.
Popular divination is nothing new, of course.
But for the longest time, it was considered a kind of mystical art. In the last century, William McKinley's ability to sense shifts in the public mood caused a political foe to note that the president had his ear so close to the ground it was full of grasshoppers. These days, gut instinct has been replaced by hard science. In the back of the new soft-cover edition of Dick Morris's book, ''Behind the Oval Office,'' he includes nearly 300 pages of polling data, proposed ads and policy suggestions prepared for Clinton in 1995 and 1996. It's apparent that scarcely an adjective fell from the president's lips without being tested for its emotional voltage.