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Debate Impressions
DEBATE IMPRESSIONS....From the latest Pew poll, John McCain doesn't seem to have done well in the first debate. The good news for both candidates is that the top impression they left was a positive one: 50 respondees thought Obama was "confident" and 61 thought McCain was "experienced." The bad news for McCain is that noticeable minorities also thought he was old, condescending, aggressive, and angry. Obama, by contrast, left audiences with only two negative impressions.
Easy come, easy go. That's the price you pay for acting like a jerk, I guess. In other Pew news, Obama's stock has gone up almost across the board. Not only does he lead McCain in their general election polling by seven points, but he's improved his standing in the areas of crisis judgment, personal qualifications, and handling the economy. McCain has dropped in all three areas.
UPDATE: The "Impressions" part of the Pew survey measured raw numbers, not percentages. I've corrected the text to reflect this.
Obama and Biden should trumpet the stats and graphs which overwhelmingly show that under Republicans, only the wealthy move forward, while everybody else, INCLUDING non-wealthy Republicans, stagnates. Economic growth is WAY better under Democratic administrations, and EVERYBODY moves forward.
Kevin, I'm pretty sure those are the number of times the words came up in the focus group, not the percentages.
Leave it to a liberal polling organization to completely ignore the overwhelming question: who puts the Country First after years of selfless service to the nation?
A black friend of mine watched the debate with me and said of McCain "I know that appearance. That is someone who hates black people so much that it raises their blood pressure just to look at them!"
'Nuff said.
Kevin misunderstood the results. They are merely a count of the number of times that a person used the word as a one word description of the candidate. For example, 28 out of 1505 people called Obama "presidential."
The information is meaningless, and Kevin misunderstood it.
Leave it to a liberal polling organization to completely ignore the overwhelming question: who puts the Country First after years of selfless service to the nation?
McCain is probably lucky they did, since he's been working pretty hard the last couple weeks to prove it ain't him!
That's the price you pay for acting like a jerk
But again, for the Republican base, acting like a jerk is a feature, not a bug.
It's notable that McCain still seems to perceive a need to appeal to his base by doing so, rather than to the middle with a more moderate persona.
Of course, we can't rule out that McCain really is a jerk.
Gregor:
Country First refers to the song rotation on McCain's iPod, which means of course, Western Second.
I'm just sayin'....
TCD
Even assuming the numbers are meaningful, they seem more evenly balanced than you argue, Mr. Drum. I count three unambiguously negative words for McCain--old, condescending, angry--from a total of 69 respondents. Obama got two--inexperienced and arrogant--from 45 respondents.
The information isn't exactly meaningless, though it certainly isn't clear what it means.
It'd probably be more useful if we knew the number of times these words were applied to the respective candidates by people in the focus group before the debate, too.
The smart money is that 61 (people, percent,mentions...whatever it is...) isn't a number that'd be associated with the pair (McCain, 'experienced') relative to people seeing McCain for the first time in this debate.
That is: the interesting question here, if there is one, is: how much did the use of this word change during the debate?
My guess: 61 was probably about the number before the debate, too.
It's not too hard to go to the Pew page. Kevin did apparently miss the disclaimer that says, "These are not percentages" on the table he copied.
But those who think there's anything good in this data from McCain are either trying to fool others or themselves. Good luck with that.
I think that the "Experienced" rating is not necessarily indicative of anything.
If a Pollster asked me if I thought McCain was experienced, I would say, yes he was experienced. I would even say that he is more experienced than Obama. So I am probably one of those 60+ percent who say he is experienced, and I will vote for a bag of sand before I vote for this guy. Sure, he is experienced, but so was Cheney, Bush Sr., Nixon, etc. As Obama has very skillfully pointed out on many occasions, judgment trumps experience every time. Experience is valuable only insofar as it creates the conditions for good judgment. It is not a primary characteristic, imho. Only a secondary one.