2008.09.29
Prez debate: What did McCain and Obama say? And how many times did they say it?
The candidates are hammering at each other, talking over each other, each tossing out talking points like crumbs to the pigeons. You come away from a presidential debate with some vague notion of who prevailed, but what actually got said? It flies by so fast, it's hard to recall.
So, to sort out Friday's debate between John McCain and Barack Obama, I took the text of the debate as transcribed by Congressional Quarterly and reported by the New York Times and converted each candidates remarks into two different quick read visualizations. One is a tag cloud, and the other is something called a "word tree."
Check out the tag clouds, and you'll get a quick view of how many times each candidate used certain words. The more often it was used, the bigger a word appears.
So, for instance, you can quickly see that Obama referred to his opponent 25 times as "John" and 35 times as "Senator McCain." McCain, conversely, didn't call Obama "Barack" a single time.
Or, you can see that McCain referred to Ronald Reagan four times, while Obama didn't mention the former Republican president.
Similarly, Obama referred four times to current president George Bush, while McCain didn't mention him.
McCain mentioned General Petraus four times, Obama not at all.
McCain said "pork barrel spending" four times.
Obama said tax cut four times.
Scroll over a word to see how many times it was used, and a few examples of the word in context.
If you want more context, check out the "word trees." Here, you can search on a word to see if it was used, and see how it was used with the words before or after it.
And if none of this scratches your itch for debate analysis, there's this, from something called the Global Language Monitor, which calls the debate a "linquistic dead heat." This analysis doesn't look at what was said, but at how it was said, such as, at what grade level did the candidates speak? How often did they use "passive voice," or, in other words, phrase sentences without a clear subject, one way to obscure responsibility?
It's interesting stuff, but can you draw any conclusion about the candidates themselves from it?
|
McCain |
Obama |
|
|
Sentences per paragraph |
2.2 |
2.1 |
|
Words per sentence |
15.9 |
17.4 |
|
Characters per word |
4.4 |
4.3 |
|
Passive voice |
5% |
5% |
|
Ease of Reading (100 Top) |
63.7 |
66.8 |
|
Grade Level |
8.3 |
8.2 |
|
Number of words (approximate) |
7,150 |
8,068 |
One thing that's obvious is both candidates like saying the other's name and pointing out their flaws. But check this out. If you take the most popular words from each candidate and arrange them in a sentence you get:
Make Senator McCain President. (from Obama's words)
Senator Obama, People President. (from McCain's words)
There are some others too.
Comment by Brad Soroka — September 30, 2008 @ 9:53 am
what difference does it make really. This doesn't tell me who I can trust. Or who is better.. at least that opinion would have been better.
Comment by ari — October 9, 2008 @ 3:58 am
I think more importantly than the debate good or bad is will our votes count in Virginia - the following is bothersome to me:
Never again should our country "assist" other countries in a free and
democratic election when we can not even control our own --- it has
been reported
and substantiated the following states have had voter fraud through
ACORN
- an Assocation that the media has linked Sen Obama ----- from busing in
the
homeless, to dead people voting - to children voting - to duplicate
votes - to "made up" registrations of false addresses and social
security numbers:
Ga, Ohio, "VIRGINIA" , Mich, Nev, Texas, Tn, Fl, New Mex. N. Car, Penna,
Colo,
Ind, Missouri, Wash, Ala., and Wisc AND HOW MANY MORE -
Whose election is this anyway??? Definitely NOT THE FREE PEOPLE of our
country.
Comment by R. Roman — October 13, 2008 @ 5:16 pm