• Polling Michelle Obama

  Posted Thursday, April 30, 2009 4:03 PM | By Liza Mundy
  
  
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  While it’s true as John says that the 100-day presidential milepost is media-made, it does afford time to ponder swift and striking changes, such as Michelle Obama’s rise in poll ratings. Less than a year ago, in June 2008, as the Washington Post pointed out in its 100-days section yesterday, Michelle Obama’s favorable rating was 48 percent. Now it’s 76 percent, meaning that this first lady is more popular than Hillary Clinton or Laura Bush at similar early junctures. Andrew Sullivan has acknowledged that Michelle’s “public relations success” is one of the aspects of this time period that surprises him. But last week, poll results from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press provided some clues as to why this has happened. To wit: conservative women like her a lot more than they did this time last year.
  
  You can glean this from one of the center’s fun tricks: one way its pollsters probe the collective unconscious is to ask people a single word they'd use to describe the person in question. Among the top three words used to describe Michelle Obama are three—classy, nice, and intelligent—that were also in the top four for Laura Bush. But while Bush tended to evoke words such as ladylike, quiet, loyal, dignified and pleasant, Michelle Obama is more likely to cause people to say things like strong, confident, smart and wife. (Why in the world “wife” didn’t spring to mind in the case of Bush is hard to imagine, but whatever; Curtis Sittenfeld corrected that.) In the top twenty for Michelle Obama, the only pejorative was “arrogant,” which occurred to seven people, the same number that came up with “awesome,” “mother,” “outgoing,” and “terrific.” Laura Bush’s only pejorative was “invisible.” For some reason, both women prompted a good number of readers to say, simply, “OK.”
  
  But here's where the one-word-thing gets sort of telling: As the Pew analysis points out, in July 2001, “conservative “ was the seventh-most-common word used to describe Laura Bush. Yet out of almost 800 respondents this year, only one person responded to the words “Michelle Obama” with the word “liberal.” Apparently, people see Michelle Obama as non-partisan, which presumably gives her crossover appeal. Someone who came into contact with her on a national service initiative recently described her to me as a “political tiger” who made effective behind-the-scenes phone calls, but the public does not see her as political.
  
  And perhaps because that is the case, the cohort among whom Michelle’s polls numbers has risen most strikingly is Republican women. In January, Pew found, just 46 percent of Republican women had a favorable view of the new First Lady. Three short months later, that figure had risen 21 percentage points, to 67 percent. That’s a big change in a short period of time. To me, this suggests that the first lady's shrewdly tended public image, which emphasizes her family values—mother, wife, daughter, vegetable gardener—has gone a long way toward winning over women of a more conservative bent. Republican men like her better now, too, than they did in January—and a lot better than they did last year—though the change is not quite so striking. So Andrew, I think there’s your answer. Or some of it.
  
  
  Filed under: Michelle Obama, Laura Bush, Pew Foundation, Curtis Sittenfeld, Favorability ratings, Andrew Sullivan
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