Ben Smith tries to put this in terms of Obama being between Bush (who didn’t really care much about what the polls said*) and Clinton (who cared a great deal about what the polls said*):
He is polling more than Bush – a bit less than once a week for most of his young term, two people involved said.
Elements of Obama’s approach bear the hallmarks of message testing, like the introduction of the words “recovery” and “reinvestment” to rebrand the “stimulus” package, and aides said the polling has focused almost entirely on selling policy, not on measuring the president’s personal appeal.
A source familiar with the data said a central insight of more recent polling had been that Americans see no distinction between the budget and the popular spending measures that preceded it, and that the key to selling the budget has been to portray it as part of the “recovery” measures.
But Obama, though polling regularly, is no Clinton either. The 42nd president studied Penn’s polls with “hypnotic intensity,” the Washington Post once wrote. Obama leaves political guru David Axelrod to sift through the results.
…but there isn’t much daylight between going over the poll results yourself and having your guy do it for you. If Obama’s White House is polling multiple times a month, and policy is being changed because of that polling, then he’s running a government-by-polls. And we really should have a word for that sort of thing by now.