In A Word: Pew poll of words describing Bush. Tracking trends.

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Just for fun, an Early Edition treat:

If you haven’t seen it yet, the “Pew Research Center” released the results of one of its annual polls, asking 740 people for a one word description:

34 Incompetent
25 Arrogant
25 Honest
19 Good
19 Idiot
13 Integrity
13 Leader
11 Strong
11 Stupid
10 Ignorant
8 Determined
8 Fair
7 Ass
7 Selfish
6 Confused
6 Dishonest
6 Persistent
6 President
6 Sincere
6 Trying
5 Committed
(…)

One guess who they were being asked to describe. Yes, it’s President Bush.

So I’m looking at previous results of this poll, and I’m noticing some trends:

When the poll was first taken in February 2004, “Excellent” ranked #6 in popularity when describing him. By the middle of the 2004 campaign, “Excellent” had fallen to 14th place in a nine way tie with words like “Decisive” and “Dumb”). The next year, “Excellent” rebounded to eighth place, before dropping off the list entirely.

Not long ago, someone discovered that if you Googled the word “failure” all by itself, the top entry was the biography of George W. Bush ON the official WhiteHouse.gov website (this embarrassing result has since been “fixed” after the White House either complained to Google, pulled or otherwise altered their page). Remembering this embarrassing result from 2004, I decided to see what some searches using Pew’s poll might result in:

Googling the word “Incompetent”… five of the top ten results, including the #1 result, have something to do with President Bush (links to the Pew poll were not among the results, in case you were wondering). Of all the people in the world, for ONE person to be so irrevocably linked to a particular word, is significant. For it to be a derogatory word like “incompetent”, should tell everyone something. Moving on…

Next on the list, “Arrogant”, still produces two Bush related articles among the top ten.

So does this mean President Bush is associated only with “negative” words? What about those “positive” words used to describe him?

The top positive word used to describe President Bush, “honest” does not produce a Bush-related link in the top ten results. Digging deeper, I gave up looking after the first ELEVEN pages of results (ten results per page). Links with even the *slightest* connection to President Bush or this current Administration did not appear among the first 110 results.

But maybe that’s because “honest” is too generic a word. What about #5, “Integrity”, a word every bit as loaded as “incompetent”? Once again, no “Bush” results after 11 pages. What about a gimmee like “Leader” to describe The Leader of the Free World? Nope, 0 for 11 there too.

Maybe it’s just Google? Trying some other search engines (note, “Yahoo” is not a search engine, it is an Index of “sites” not individual articles or pages, and therefore produced even worse results) such as “Ask.com“, we find six of the top ten results for “incompetent” are links relating to President Bush (with a seventh linking to a site heavy with anti-Bush editorials… counterpunch.org).

“Honest”? “Leader”? “Integrity”? Nope, nope and nope. Apparently, Partisans are the only ones that associate those words with President Bush.

This entry was posted on February 21, 2007 at 1:37 pm and is filed under Political News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.