Obama Jobs Speech Lifts His Standing With Consumers

Obama mingles prior to his speech.

Depending on who you read or listen to, President Obama either struck out or hit it out of the park last night. His joint address to Congress was panned by many, loved by others, which is just about status quo for politics these days.

Besides the pundits and talking heads, you can also read a lot of polls and survey results based on a small but, we're told, scientific sampling of a few thousand Americans. Public opinion surveys are fine but sometimes it's interesting to forget about the scientific sample and look at some big numbers.

In that spirit, ConsumerAffairs.com analyzed 28 million consumer comments made on Facebook, Twitter and other social Web sites, blogs and forums over the last year, hoping to glean a new perspective on the state of the nation and its denizens.

What we found, using computerized sentiment analysis, is that consumers' opinion of Obama has been just about evenly divided, though approval has been trending up slowly but steadily since July, when it hit its low point – 14% negative – over the last 12 months, and his fire-and-brimstone speech last night seems to have made the rafters ring and jolted his approval rating 12 or so notches higher.

The blue line shows 28 million consumers' net sentiment about Obama for the last 12 months.

On Sept. 7, the day before his speech, comments in the blogosphere were just about dead even. By today, positive comments were outpacing negatives by 12%.

The blue line shows the net sentiment of about 100,000 consumer sentiments expressed in September.

Consumer comments

Here are a few positive comments from the last couple of days:

• "Perry cut Fire Department budget by 75%. Obama looks good." (Orangemane.com)

• "Obama is fired up" … "Obama looks good" "Obama low approval is collateral damage caused by GOP sabotage" (Twitter)

• "Obama makes great speeches."

• "President Obama fired up. Strong, bold speech" (Facebook)

And a few negatives:

• "Obama is the reason Obama will lose" … "Obama is still suffering from the Speech Illusion" … "Obama lost many." (Twitter)

• "Obama ruins everything" (Twitter)

• "Obama was indecisive." (posttrainwreck.com)

• "Obama is irrelevant." (Twitter)