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By "groups," Bentley is not talking about the demographic groups often reported on in polls (men and women voters, minority voters, voters of different ages, religion etc.) or the broad categories of political leanings (liberal, conservative, independent). He means "organization groups" like the American Association of Retired Persons or the National Rifle Association, and "talk" or "discussion" groups, by which he means well-meaning associations of people or professionals claiming to represent a good cause like journalists, reformers, activists, humanitarians and the like. The latter group, Bentley would argue, "matters far less than we think."

Here's the passage in the article that caught our eye:

Under Bentley's rules, you can't talk about public opinion, because there is no such thing as "the public" (there are only groups) and opinions don't matter, only actions do. Abstractions like "the people" and "popular will" have no real content, either. "The public interest" is a useless concept, he says, because "there is nothing which is best literally for the whole people." You can't talk about a society as a whole having a collective soul, or about events being moved by the "spirit of the age" or the "Zeitgeist" or by feelings, individual or collective...You can talk about Presidents, parties, and other major political actors, but only if you understand them chiefly as mediums through which interest groups operate.

Politicians are often criticized for being slaves to what the polls tell them. But in a Bentley analysis, Lemann writes, it is these groups that are the driving forces behind which directions the candidates take.

Closer attention to Bentley would help us understand why, as politicians succeed, they become more obviously attentive to interest groups, more obviously engaged in bargain and compromise. Hillary Clinton was this year's version of the pandering, old-politics candidate, a role that proved more appealing the longer the primary season went on. But when she was a new face in Washington, back in 1993, her identity was pretty much the opposite. Both John McCain and Barack Obama have disappointed some of their early, ardent supporters by modifying many of their positions to accommodate the established and organized interests of their parties.

If Bentley's thesis is a good one, and there's good evidence that it is, it's a reminder to us about how to read the right tea leaves when we try to decipher what's going on in campaigns and government.