Tuesday, December 29, 2009 — 5:52 p.m. — 19.4°F
The CNN/Opinion Research Corporation released a poll today on Barack Obama’s current popularity. The referring article on CNN.com dealt primarily with the views of black respondents in the poll. In particular, while reporting that more than 90% of black respondents approve of Obama’s job as President, the authors seemed surprised when only 42 percent of blacks said they are thrilled with his job as president, while another 50+ percent said they were happy but not thrilled.
I looked up definitions for “thrill” and “thrilled” and found synonyms and phrases such as
- excite greatly
- delight
- cause to quiver, tremble, or vibrate
- overwhelming emotional effect
- enrapture
- shiver and/or tingle
Thrilled and dazed. How long can one function in this condition?
Pretty powerful stuff. Yet CNN finds it ominous that “only” about half of blacks who are happy with Obama’s performance are actually driven into to such an uncontrolled physical response due to their happiness.
I don’t know that I even have a personal state that could be described as “thrilled”. If I did know I was thrilled about something, I’m not sure I would confess to a pollster what sorts of thoughts it took to drive me into such a condition. I doubt very much the performance of any politician would do so. If the Vikings had managed to win one of their Super Bowl attempts during my teen years in the 1970s I might have been thrilled, for a few hours anyway, but a Super Bowl win now probably wouldn’t do the trick. Still, I wouldn’t mind having the opportunity to find out about that one some day.
From the definitions I found, I would think it would be difficult to maintain a state of thrill for very long. Such fervent excitement is usually tied to a moment, and tapers off once the moment or event has passed. I could see how an Obama fan might have been thrilled the night of the election, or perhaps even still the following morning. To have 42% of any group proclaim themselves as still thrilled almost a year after Obama took office seems to me to be a remarkable feat, despite CNN’s attempts to cast the results in a negative light.
