Cindy Sheehan cited several reasons for camping outside George Bush's ranch in Crawford, TX. One of these reasons she stated
"I want to put the war back on the front page where it belongs." More than two weeks have passed since she embarked on this quest. Has she been successful in this regard?
Starting from Day 3 (August 8th) of Camp Casey, I visited google.com almost daily to record the number of webpage hits for "Cindy Sheehan". I count the number of webpages linked within Google's entire realm (excluding 'similar pages'). Additionally, to see how well the media is noticing the story I've also recorded the number of Google News links for "Cindy Sheehan". Read on to see the effect she's had on the media.
Below are two plots for the number of returned hits, both at 'www.google.com' and 'news.google.com'. [Click the graph for the same plot but larger] The green graph is for the whole web, the Y axis in Millions of Hits. THe Blue graph is only news sources, scaled in Thousands of Hits. The day number at Camp Casey is along the X axis (Day 1 was August 6). Notable events have been annotated on the graph. Sorry I missed two days.
Over the past few weeks, webpages mentioned Cindy Sheehan have increased from practically none to
over three million. Of course not all of these refer to her in a good light, but she's clearly making waves. But more importantly, how about references to Cindy in the news? She's gone from nearly nil news sources to
over ten thousand recent references. For comparison, just a search for President Bush (without quotes) at news.google.com returns 80,000 (A search of just "bush" returns 140,000 within news.google.com, but I wouldn't recommend searching the whole google web for that word). Accounting for variations (George Bush, President Bush, etc), for approximately every ten news stories about George Bush there is one for Cindy Sheehan. That's quite an impact one woman could hope to make!
Additionally, people are starting to wake up and take notice. The swiftboating against Cindy has shot into full swing, but much of the public is beginning to see through it. As Jon Stewart said in tonight's Daily Show, they're attacking her like she's a policy maker, but that's not her role. And their attacks are failing. As noted here recently, Bush's approval ratings have slipped significantly in the past month. Republican Senators from red states are
criticizing the war .
The tide is turning. The public is waking up. Americans are increasingly fed up with the Iraq war.
Another reason Cindy gives for wanting to meet with the President is "He [President Bush] said my son died in a noble cause, and I want to ask him what that noble cause is." Given Cindy's extraordinary efforts and the recent change in public opinion of the War in Iraq, I might venture to say that perhaps a Noble Cause has become of Casey's death. Only it's not the same one George Bush thinks it is.