Out-of-touch moves into No. 1 position over Deficit Spending; Oil Spill tops Health Care Reformer
Austin, Texas, July 24, 2010 – As the political calendar inexorably heads toward the Mid-term elections, the focus on President Obama’s competing ‘narratives’ continue to play out in the media.
Since his Oval Address on the Oil Spill, Obama’s personal narrative is being shaped by forces largely out of his control, such as the on-going Gulf drama. These are how the five most prevalent competing narratives compare, according to Austin-based Global Language Monitor (GLM). GLM has been monitoring the language of politics since 2003.
The ranking of the President’s five most prominent narrative arcs include:
- Obama as out-of-touch or aloof – This is up 1200% since the beginning of the year; this is the converse of Hope and Change.
- Obama and the deficit — Words linking Obama to deficit have increased some 2500% since the beginning of 2010.
- Obama and the Oil Spill — A very fast mover now ahead of Obama as Health Care reformer. Could the completion of the relief well turn this around?
- Obama as HealthCare Reformer — Losing steam quickly for the president’s signature achievement.
- Obama as the Chicago-style pol — A continued, steady rise in linking Obama to old-style Chicago politics.
“At this point, all five narratives in play are problematic for the president,” said Paul JJ Payack, GLM’s president and chief word analyst. “With the Mid-terms some hundred days away, the president needs a series of (possibly unexpected) positive events to stem this tide.”
Obama Narrative 2.0, the underlying storyline that will largely define the president in the run-up to the Mid-term elections and, possibly, for time remaining in his term. The ‘narrative’ refers to the stream of public opinion captured by blogs and other social media outlets on the Internet, as well as the leading print and electronic databases.
The NarrativeTracker Index (NTI), the first product specifically designed to use social media-based monitoring to better understand the issues driving any particular topic. Because the NTI is based on the national discourse, it provides a real-time, accurate picture of what the public is saying about any topic, at any point in time. In addition to the NTI, the Narrative Tracker Arc™ follows the rise and fall of sub-stories within the main narrative to provide a comprehensive overview of the opinions surrounding a single issue.
NTI tracks the ‘narrative’ of a subject, as well as projecting future trajectories for the narrative. The result has several advantages over traditional polls: 1) Immediacy; 2) The lack of any bias that tends to creep into traditional polling, e.g., when individuals answer questions with what they think are the ‘correct’ answers rather than their true opinions; and 3) NTI lets policy and decision makers focus on the true issues driving perceptions and concerns rather than being driven by false and phantom concepts. In addition, the Narrative Tracker Arc™ follows the rise and fall of sub-stories within the main narrative.
NTI is more effective in capturing the true opinion of the public because it tracks unfiltered keywords in Social Media and other sources, rather than how that opinion is interpreted by the news media or by pollsters.
The NTI is based on the GLM’s Predictive Quantities Indicator™ (PQI™). The PQI tracks the frequency of words and phrases in global print and electronic media on the Internet, throughout the Blogosphere and other social media outlets as well as accessing proprietary databases. The PQI is a weighted index that factors in long-term trends, short-term changes, momentum, and velocity.
