Measuring “the Palin Effect”: Obama & the Death Panel Rhetoric

There are a lot of differing opinions about Obama’s health care plan. Democrats contend that they simply want to provide a public option for those who go without health care. Republicans have been saying that the plan will push deficit spending even further. Sarah Palin jumped into the fray by using her Facebook page to spread the idea that the plan’s boards for measuring end-of-life policies were similar to Nazi “death panels”. While Representative Barney Frank chided one woman for holding such a notion, the idea is prevalent in some conservative circles.

Obama is taking this argument straight to his detractors by making appearances on conservative talk shows. The question is, how effective have conservatives like Sarah Palin been at painting Obama as an elder-killing Nazi? We used Biz360’s Community Insights platform to measure how often the word “Obama” was used with the term “death panel”. The results are very interesting.

The bulk of the coverage was concentrated in blogs and discussion boards/forums. Upon further more detailed evaluation, much of the negative coverage occurred in discussion boards/forums with bigger sources being MySpace and Topix.net. The posts that covered Obama in a positive light tended to come from the blogging community LiveJournal.

Palin introduced the concept on her Facebook page on August 7. As you can see from this graph, the topic grew over 400 percent in just four days. It then died down to roughly the same levels of the initial push by August 19.

Did Palin’s Facebook jabs push the rhetoric to the right enough to diffuse Obama’s efforts, or does this graph show that “the Palin effect” amounts to a flash in the pan? We will continue to measure this trend as well as others that arise from the health care debate to see how well Obama and the Democrats can control their public message.

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Tags: death panel, manage message online, managing message online, obama death panel, obama health care pr, obama healthcare PR

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