December 01, 2008
Center-right in my ass
David Sirota wrote before the election that the race would be on, if Obama won as handily as he did, to redefine the US from a conservative nation to a center-right nation. Turns out he was spot on.
When I wrote my first column about the "center-right nation" and subsequently launched the "Center-Right Nation Watch" series on this blog I predicted that the news media would actually increase its usage of this term after Obama won. I did a Lexis-Nexis search of the term, and was the first to note the trend and make the prediction that "if Obama wins, expect more frantic talk from the fringe about how electing a black man billed as an Islamic Karl Marx obviously means our country is more conservative than ever."
Feeling like I was out on a limb (and remember, this was almost 2 weeks before a group of major progressive pundits belatedly started writing about the trend), I asked a friend out here in Denver who works with a company called Trendrr to officially track whether my prediction was right - and you can see from the results above, it was - more so than I ever expected.
As the graph shows, the use of the exact term "center-right nation" spiked immediately after election day (point "0" is the day my column published, point "1" is election day).
While it's true - this trend study doesn't tell us how many of the "center-right nation" references are saying this is "not a center-right nation." But a look through Lexis-Nexis shows it's safe to assume that the vast majority of these references are asserting this is a "center-right nation."
Even the NYT got in on the act as if making pragmatic decisions were some kind of an indication of a move to the center-right rather than just good decision making in the case of Geithner at Treasury and Clinton at State.
Of course, the media is far more conservative than the electorate. The percentage of young, well known media personalities, pundits and reporters is not the same as the percentage of younger people in the electorate. That will change as people like Tweety die off or become increasingly irrelevant.
Until then, feel free to point out how badly they are misreading the mood in this country.
(via Digby)
Posted by mcblogger at December 1, 2008 09:01 AM
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