WASHINGTON -- The polls speak and Washington listens -- not wisely, but too well.

The polls show that crime is the preeminent issue, and so all of Washington rushes to get tough on crime. The polls show that the public actually thinks President Clinton, the most domestic-oriented president since Calvin Coolidge, spends too much time on international affairs, so administration policies on Haiti, North Korea and the future of Russia and the Western alliance continue to drift.

The result is that Washington has a lot of polls and is exercising very little leadership.

Consider the scene the other day at the health care deliberations conducted by a House labor-management subcommittee. ''Every member that got up to talk about whether a benefit should be in the package or not was quoting some poll,'' complained Rep. Ron Klink (D-Pa.). ''Every member has some half-assed poll of his own district, and members use them whatever way they want. Everyone is using some poll or another in every discussion.''

This is not what the Founding Fathers had in mind. The Founders, to be sure, could not have anticipated all the changes that have occurred in this country over the past two centuries. But they surely would not have expected a situation where a president could have spent $1,986,410 on polling for a single year.

But that's how much President Clinton paid a former Yale academic named Stanley Greenberg for polling last year. Greenberg does several polls and several focus groups a month for the White House. The polls are the magnetic north of the president's policy compass. The focus groups provide the idiom for many of his public utterances.

''When I conduct focus groups, from Topeka to New York, I quite literally hear, word-for-word, the same things Bill Clinton is saying,'' says Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster. ''I know it's not because people are copying Clinton. It's what they think and feel. That's what's so critical about Clinton -- he understands what people feel, not just what they think. He is a pollster's dream because he can internalize what Stan Greenberg tells him. Words from focus groups become Bill Clinton's words.''

It is the equivalent of a Vulcan mind meld, pioneered perhaps by Star Trek's Mr. Spock but perfected by the current administration, among Clinton, Greenberg and the American people.

As a result, this may be the very first president to say not only what the public wants to hear -- a special skill, honed over several years -- but also what the public itself says. It is a remarkable political achievement.

But Clinton is the president now, not just a candidate for the office, and a president has to do more than simply appeal to the people. He must lead them.

The ancient Greeks spoke of a democracy where, as Thucydides put it, a leader ''led them, not they him.'' In his insightful new book, ''Certain Trumpets,'' Garry Wills notes a more modern conception of democracy, where ''the leader does not pronounce God's will to the people but carries out what is decided by the people.'' That leaves Wills worrying whether ''the leader is, in that case, mainly a follower.''

This is a very old debate, older than the republic, older even than the English political tradition and the notion, proffered by Edmund Burke, that a member of Parliament should not merely represent his constituents' viewpoints but instead owes those constituents, and the country, the benefit of his good judgment.

Several years ago President Bush invited the historian David McCullough to the White House to give a lecture on Theodore Roosevelt. There, in a setting sacred to democracy, the historian told the president that Theodore Roosevelt didn't care much for, or about, public opinion. ''He didn't give much time to what the people were thinking,'' McCullough said. ''He said: 'I don't know what they think. I just know what they ought to think.' ''

Hardly anyone argues today (or did in the first decade of the century, when TR was president) that public opinion shouldn't be important in American politics and government. The question isn't whether public opinion should play a role, but how big the role should be.

''Even if politicians cared about nothing but reelection, they should still not simply follow the polls,'' says Gary C. Jacobson of the University of California at San Diego, a specialist in congressional elections. ''They have to try to anticipate what public reactions are going to be sometime in the future. What people want now might not be what they want later, or what they will want once they have gotten what they say they want.''

Polls are a tool, valuable to politicians if used correctly. As hints from the public, they can provide the spark toward midcourse corrections; a classic example of such a hint -- not followed, unhappily for Republicans -- was public dissatisfaction with President Bush's neglect of domestic economic issues. Polls also can allow leaders to understand the obstacles they will encounter if they try to exert leadership. But they are not a substitute for leadership.

The Founders designed the government as a representative democracy. They did not have government-by-referendum or government-by-poll in mind.

This question has taken on a new urgency in today's Washington, where the president's capacity for leadership has been diminished by his reliance on public polling. Clinton's proclivity for consulting the polls is so widely known that he has undercut his own presidency and made even his closest allies skeptical of his judgment, or at least of the way he proceeds toward judgment.

The most stunning example occurred earlier this month, just after he chose Stephen G. Breyer, chief judge of the US Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston, for the Supreme Court. Two days after the selection, which Clinton made despite reportedly wanting to appoint Bruce Babbitt, a public and therefore more controversial person, to the court, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) went on the CBS-TV program ''Face the Nation'' and urged the president to be steelier and more decisive. ''You have to stand up every so often and just say: 'Look, this is what I'm going to do.' . . . You know, forget the polls, forget these political considerations. Sometimes stake out things and you say, 'This is what I want to do,' and do it. It's amazing how the American people, even in a state as Republican as mine, will rally to that.''

But the president seldom does that. The shame is that the very area where he needs the most help -- foreign policy -- is the area where he could do himself the most good, and where the public, regardless of what they tell the pollsters, is likely to follow him -- at least for a time.

The public, to be sure, believes the president already spends too much time on foreign affairs; the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News Poll, for example, shows that 38 percent of the public says it believes he is putting too much time and attention on foreign affairs, as compared with 29 percent that says it believes the balance between foreign and domestic is about right and 19 percent that says it believes that he is concentrating too much on domestic questions.

The problem is that polls -- even those that show, for example, public skepticism about military involvement in Haiti -- give too limited a view of a political leader's ability to alter public opinion.

Polls in December 1990, on the eve of the Gulf War, gave no indication that President Bush would be the recipient of stratospheric poll ratings as a result of Desert Storm. What the public -- only 17 percent of whom know that Serbia is at fault in the former Yugoslavia -- thinks now about Bosnia is irrelevant. No poll can gauge the shape of public opinion if Clinton were to address the country on the subject. Nor can any poll suggest how the public -- which by a 49-to-41 margin says it believes the United States has no responsibility to act in Bosnia, according to the CBS/New York Times Poll -- would respond to strong presidential language and action on the situation in the Balkans.

Indeed, foreign policy is the one area where presidential leadership can make the difference between something happening (including shifts in opinion) and nothing happening. There are sufficient forces in motion to keep things moving in the domestic area even in the absence of presidential leadership. But the only momentum in foreign policy during peacetime is to do nothing.

There is another danger. The fact that the illegitimate rulers of Haiti now know that the president is governed in large measure by polls means that Clinton's military threats are somewhat less credible. In a society where polls are numerous and easily accessible, the United States' adversaries, who tune into CNN and read American news clippings, have the same access to the same information the president has. The Haitian leaders, for example, know that the latest Time/CNN Poll indicates that only 43 percent of the public says it believes the United States has a great deal at stake in Haiti, as compared with 53 percent who believe the same for Bosnia, 62 percent for North Korea and 70 percent for Russia.

But there are dangers to polls even on the domestic side. Most professional pollsters are exceedingly careful to assure that the language of their questions doesn't shape the public's response. In an area as complicated as health care overhaul, however, there are additional dangers. Many respondents do not understand the Washington debate and, according to a study on public attitudes on health care by Karlyn H. Bowman for the American Enterprise Institute, ''certain code words, phrases or descriptions that speak to concerns about reform are going to affect responses.''

Many of the respondents may have tailored their answers so as to avoid embarrassment. In her new book, ''Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness,'' former Reagan and Bush speechwriter Peggy Noonan worries that polls have ''the effect of hardening opinions that haven't even been formed yet'' because people feel the need to answer pollsters' questions, and in a sophisticated, knowledgeable way.

The administration fell into the poll trap when it argued that positive public reaction to the president's September speech calling for changes in the health care system constituted support for the president's plan. Now, according to the Bowman study, the administration ''finds itself in the unenviable position of responding to questions about why 'support' has declined.''

Not that the president is fully to blame for all of this. Polls are everywhere these days; they are part of the landscape of American politics.

Take next month's Republican primary for lieutenant governor in Alabama as an eccentric but perhaps representative example. Both GOP candidates for this job, hardly the commanding heights of politics even in Alabama, have pollsters. The primary election for secretary of state in Florida isn't until September, but already both Democratic candidates have signed up pollsters. Garry Mauro, the Clintonista who is a land commissioner in Texas, has his own pollster.

The disease is so rampant that some people are talking seriously about hiring a full-time bipartisan pollster for Congress.

''I don't want government by polling,'' says Rep. Klink, who has sponsored the legislation. ''I just want us to have accurate polls.''

It is a commonplace of politics that no polls are fully accurate, and that the only poll that matters occurs on Election Day. So in that respect Congress already has polls, provided, as it turns out, by the Founders themselves. They are completely accurate. They're probably the only ones Congress needs.

They're almost surely not enough for Bill Clinton, though.

GREAT MOMENTS IN POLLING HISTORY

• 1824: First use of public opinion polling in a presidential race
• 1901: George Gallup born
• 1921: Louis Harris born
• 1936: Literary Digest straw poll predicts Landon will beat Roosevelt
• 1948: Dewey supposed to defeat Truman
• 1960: Patrick Caddell, 10, conducts first poll
• 1979: Caddell sends Jimmy Carter ''malaise'' memo
• 1989: 33 percent of voters in Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll say they voted for Dukakis in 1988 election (actual figure was 46 percent)
• 1991: Pollster Robert Teeter named head of Bush reelection campaign
• 1992: Bush loses

TAKING POLLS APART

''Polls are only good for dogs.''
--John Diefenbaker, Canadian prime minister

''I grieve to see that the government is governed by the hurrahs of . . . the citizens. It does not lead opinion, it follows it.''
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

''We don't base our opinions on the Gallup Poll.''
--Lyndon B. Johnson

''The worse I do the more popular I get.''
--John F. Kennedy, on his poll ratings after the Bay of Pigs

''Wouldn't it be wonderful if we didn't have any idea how this election would come out?''
--Charles Kuralt, two days before the 1988 presidential election

''I took my own informal, politician's poll. I talked to 56 people. All 56 said that they didn't think that Truman could win, but all 56 said they were voting for Truman.''
-- Thomas P. (Tip) O'Neill Jr., on the 1948 presidential election

''July [polling] does not a November election make.''
--Gov. Ann Richards (D-Texas)

''Almost everyone in the firm was for Truman. But we saw the future of the firm going down the drain.''
--Pollster Elmo Roper, reflecting on his prediction 40 years earlier that Dewey would defeat Truman

''When a pollster's forecast is acurate, it is not news; when it is wrong, the words of Jesus to the Pharisees are recalled: 'O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can you not discern the signs of the times?' ''
--William Safire

''Any administration worth its salt does not make policy decisions based on the ups and downs of a poll.''
--John Sununu

''The experts get more wrong all the time.''
--Harry Truman, October 1948