If you happened to see the health care summit that President Barack Obama hosted the other day -- I admit it was a bit of an effort, so perhaps intruders came into your house and tied you to a chair in front of the TV -- you saw the Republicans insist with great certainty that Americans don't want health care legislation.

Being closer to the Almighty than most of us, Republicans do have a knack for speaking with almost divine assurance on many subjects, as in Dick Cheney's famous declaration on Iraq, "We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators."

In fact, it may be that the Republicans are correct about Americans not liking the current health care bills. I don't know and, as I will explain later, I don't care.

But as Rep. Henry Waxman, a Democrat from California who supports health care reform, observed at the summit: "Now, I hear people all day say, 'Mr. President, the public doesn't want your plan.' Well, if I heard the kind of rhetoric over and over again that I've heard from some of the Republicans, I wouldn't want your plan either."

(By the way, Mr. Waxman is the rarest of politicians -- he is bald and has a mustache, a type of fellow always to be trusted, a view of course not influenced by my own baldness and mustache. As it is, my mustache is a sly one and can't be trusted to stay out of the soup.)

Whether Americans have been influenced by the propaganda barrage of unfactual facts, as Mr. Waxman suggests, I don't know. But speaking as an American, albeit a naturalized one, I do know that I was not consulted on what Americans think about health care reform. I am thinking that you probably weren't either.

True, we were consulted in November 2008 in the presidential election when we decisively gave our opinion on health care and other issues, but nobody has asked most of us since.

So how can the Republicans say with such certainty that Americans don't like the health care legislation? Well, they hear from their constituents. And as they tend to represent conservative districts, they doubtless hear a lot from voters who want them to resist the government-controlled death panels of their fevered dreams.

Yet what these GOP politicians believe is mostly rooted in public opinion polls. It is polling that allowed Republican Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming to say at the summit that "only one in three people in America support what is being proposed here."

While I haven't met the other two, even if this is true, I could argue that the answer all depends on how the question was asked. However, I won't. My response is to pose another question: So what?

As far as I am concerned, people can differ on health care reform but they should be unanimous in support of the principle that a government -- any government -- shouldn't be run according to the shifting findings of public opinion polls. It is an odd thing now for the conservative party to suggest otherwise.

Where in the Constitution does it call for public opinion polls to decide the great issues of the day? Will we the poll-driven people come to accept that a government of the polls, by the polls and for the polls shall not perish from the earth?

What if the Continental Congress had been influenced by opinion polls when Gen. George Washington was holed up at Valley Forge in the terrible winter of 1777-78?

What if the pollsters had asked: Do you have confidence in a commander with wooden teeth? Should government-subsidized shoes be given to the troops? Do you support the free market in patriotic war profiteering? (I know, I know, George Washington's teeth weren't really wooden -- that was merely the death panel rumor of the time.)

If polling had existed back then, bowlers and wicket keepers would now be reporting in advance of the new cricket season. So don't tell me, Congressman Republican, what Americans believe about health care reform.

Nobody asked me and a great many others except back in 2008. Public opinion polls are informative but they should not be determinative -- that's the place of elections. And the way to win elections is to gain the respect of the voters by acting on principle.

If Democrats fall into the Republican trap of being cowed by public opinion polls, we may yet get President Palin in 2013 governing in the style now favored by her party, watching the winds of Gallup turn the old weather vane -- the one with the bronze moose. Shame then on all of us.

Jack Kelly and Reg Henry spar on the topics of the day exclusively at PG+, a members-only web site of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.