Using this link here, NBC compiles a word cloud of candidate's positives and negatives. Besides the obvious ones like "Economy" for Obama and "Wealthy" for Romney, what other negatives/positives do you agree with and why?
Negatives Romney:
Don’t Trust
Out of Touch
Wealthy
Abortion
Flip Flopper
Bad/Disaster
Bain Capital
Republican
Cut Entitlements
Corporate
Gay Marriage
Outsourcing
Cold
Positives Romney:
Change
Good Businessman
Conservative
Experience
Repeal ObamaCare
Experienced
Qualified
Morals
Lower Taxes
Leader
Trustworthy
Confidence
Negatives Obama
Incompetent
Big Spender
Unemployment
Socialist
Republicans
Liberal
Economy
Bad/Disaster
Socialist
Failure
Broken Promises
Solyndra
Dishonest
Positives Obama
Honest
Change
For People
Health Care
Good Speaker
Entitlements
Military/Wars
No Support
Good Leader
Immigration
Ethnicity
Gay Marriage
Intelligent
Sorry - the page wouldn't come up for me - is it a phone-app thing? -- Jill
ReplyDeleteThere we go. I just manually typed everything in there.
ReplyDeleteThis was from NBC Nightly News 06-26-2012.
--Mutanatia
A few things on this one, which I found interesting, BTW.
ReplyDeleteThe things the two candidates have in common are two in the "positives" category are the words "Change" and "Leader/Good Leader" (Romney/Obama, respectively). Being that this word cloud is posted on the NBC website, I'm concluding that these words were picked from its viewership, which is mostly Centrist-Left and Left in general. I am curious to see what this word cloud would look like on a conservative forum or maybe a more "centrist" website like CNN, etc. But that said, I did find it interesting that this particular viewership held predictable opinions of both both candidates.
What is astonishing, though, is that both candidates had more "negatives" in common than positives. There were words that were similar, close in meaning, but not exactly the same, so I included there here because there were so many. The negatives in common/similarities were: (in this order: Romney/Obama)
Bad Disaster/Bad Disaster (exact match), Don't trust/ Dishonest, Flip-Flopper/Broken Promises, Outsourcing/Unemployment, Bain Capital/Solyndra.
The "opposites" in qualities were as follow (Romney/Obama): Corporate/Socialist, Cut Entitlements/Big Spender.
What is interesting to me is how polarized the viewership is even on a site with a mostly liberal viewership. This can't really be established for certain, but one can reasonably conclude that a lot of "moderates" visit the site. They are apparently polarized in opinion as well. The viewership obviously wants "change" and "Good Leadership" from both candidates, but according to this word cloud, the candidates are seen as opposites on a lot of issues. Both apparently have high negatives in terms of how people feel about them, at least on NBC's site. The only conclusion I can draw here is that people who visit the site in general are even more polarized than in 2008, and it will be interesting to see of the election results of 2012 reflect this.