Pat Dollard

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The Swamp:

by Frank James

The reaction to the latest Obama Girl video, “Hillary! Stop the Attacks” may indicate that she could be used as a secret Republican weapon against Sen. Barack Obama since her presence on a screen appears to really turn people against the Democratic presidential candidate from Illinois.

HCD Research Inc., which employs its MediaCurves technology to focus-group media content, found that many of the 440 participants in its survey conducted via Internet were left feeling less warm about the senator because of the young model, her message, or both.

What’s more, when they asked the participants to pick a word that described their emotional response to the new video, many chose “irritated” and “embarrassed” to characterize their reactions.

Amber Lee Ettinger, the curvy young woman who plays Obama Girl, became a big Internet deal with last year’s “I’ve Got a Crush on Obama” video. Apparently, she’s now soooo 2007.

Still, it’s noteworthy that even though men and women seemed to indicate they had negative feelings towards Obama based on the video, women appeared more turned off by the video than men (duh.)

Anyway, based on the response, if Obama eventually wins his party’s presidential nomination, Republicans might want to pay Ettinger a king’s ransom to keep turning out the Obamaphiliac videos. Just a thought.

This is from the HCD press release:

Among the study findings:
Among political parties, the emotions most felt by Democrats while watching the video were “irritated” (51%), followed by “embarrassed” (41%), compared to Republicans, who reported “irritated” (52%) and “skeptical” (35%) as the emotions most felt, and independents who reported “irritated” (42%) and “embarrassed” (36%) as the emotions most felt.

A majority of all respondents (71%) reported that if they saw the video online, they would not forward it to family or friends.

There was little change regarding which candidate respondents would vote for after viewing the video.

Half of all respondents (50%) reported that the video was produced by “a separate organization unrelated to any campaign” and 34% thought it was sponsored by the Obama campaign.