John McCain and Barack Obama’s acceptance speeches
John McCain’s acceptance speech
Update: Welcome readers from the Houston Chronicle! Thanks so much for checking out my post. Feel free to check out the rest of the blog if you’ve got a spare second.
I’m not the biggest fan of politics. I want to get that out of the way before I get into the meat of this post. You’ll never see me parading around with a candidate’s sticker on my car. But now that I’m on Twitter, I’ve found that 95% of the people on there also use it to push their political beliefs, using it as a veritable candidate’s bumper sticker.* I’ve read a lot of 140 character statements about how much Sarah Palin sucks and McCain is lifting elements of his speeches and how Republicans this and that and blah blah blah… MOST of this was going on during McCain and Obama’s nomination acceptance speeches. It was like reading live micro-blogging.
Barack Obama’s accceptance speech
Keeping that in mind, today I was getting back up-to-date with some old Tweets, and found this one from my CEO, Ed Schipul: “Words missing for both parties.’Economy, privacy, jobs, balanced budget, peace, health care, pension bankruptcy, etc…’”
What are we actually talking about?
His point is clear: What are the candidates really trying to sell us in these speeches? Ed wants to know about Obama’s plans for a balanced budget, about McCain’s plan to lower healthcare costs, etc. But what he heard was lofty, dream talk. Not a whole lot of actionable items.
So: Is a nomination speech supposed to be dedicated to actionable items? To telling the nation their plans if elected president? If so, why are there only democratic delegates invited to the DNC and Republicans to the RNC? Is the speech supposed to to merely be an acceptance speech similar to that of a hall-of-famer being inducted? Or, quite obviously, there is still work to be done, so do they treat it as a chance to politik to the whole nation?
Analyzing a speech the graphic way
Whatever way you view it, they still addressed the nation with their speeches the way they felt needed to be done. Now this post is not dedicated to campaigning for either side. I’m not here to offer any of my own political insight at all. However, what I do think is interesting is analyzing the content of the two candidate’s speeches to see what they really talked about, and not just what a democrat “heard” McCain say, or what a conservative “heard” Obama say.
Check out the Wordles of both candidates speeches. Wordles take the content of a grouping of text (like a speech or an RSS feed) and give the most popular word larger font and weight. It’s a simple visualization to help a graphically oriented person literally see what they were talking about.
Some notes about the speeches (in hopefully an entirely non-partisan manner):
- If anyone ever thought McCain was mudslinging Obama, they’d apparently be wrong. Obama certainly called out McCain more than the other way around. Note how large McCain’s name is on Obama’s Wordle. Even “John” is pretty large.
- McCain is obviously playing towards the nebulous ‘American’. “Americans” is huge, “country” is massive. And knowing he comes from a military background, he’s playing that up in his speech: “fight” for our country, “fought,” “war,” “government”… all very blue-collar, conservative words.
- Check out Obama’s most emphasized word: Promise. It’s exactly what he’s been selling most Americans: a promise, a dream. It’s the way he’s branded himself and it seems to be working. I’m not saying he’s a liar at all, but when candidates build their platform on promises BEFORE being elected, there’s an awful lot to live up to. (”Read my lips…”)
- Interesting note also there: “Change” is not as big as I would have expected it to be on Obama’s. It’s his big thing. “New country” is pretty large up there, though.
Anyway, it’s pretty cool to see what they’re actually talking about in their speeches. So even if you didn’t listen to both speeches from start to finish, you can still get a pretty good idea of what they’re trying to pitch.
* I have to say I’m OK with this; it’s a micro-blogging site, that’s what it’s supposed to be used for, share your ideas freely. After all, I opted in to following you. It’s not like your barraging me and I didn’t want you to.
Personally I think it’s okay that their acceptance speeches were vague. They have a million other chances to get specific with us, and the conventions are their time to just coast for a bit.
I’ve never thought acceptance speeches were meant to convince people to vote for the candidate. Conventions are not supposed to convince swing voters to vote for either party. They’re supposed to be the time when the party chooses its platform for the next four years. Acceptance speeches are meant for candidates to rally their troops.
Many of my (liberal) coworkers were mad about how Sarah Palin picked on Obama during her acceptance speech but I think they don’t understand that Palin wasn’t trying to get THEM to vote for McCain. Palin was getting the GOP excited. And I guess it worked!
What a clever way to analyze the candidates’ acceptance speeches. I’m impressed.
Very interesting, David. Nice analysis.
It is unbelievable how the press is buying into the position that the Democrats do not know what to do. They know what to do all right, get rid of the top three Democrats that allowed Fannie Mae and company, and probably put them in jail for assisting in the fraud? Does McCain’s weakness of being too humble about his skills hurting him now? Does he really not know enough about the economy and Wall Street, or was he pursuing appropriate regulation on an out of controll Democratic Congress making unreasonable guarantees to Fannie Mae and other mortgage companies back in 2005?
I think Mr. McCain has sold himself short, and the Democrats have been planning this from the start? It would be difficult, if not impossible to prove that these mortgage companies, seeing the fall of Mr. Obama in this election, decide at this moment to “play their cards” and cry wolf to the financial community, betting that Mr. McCain will fumble the ball, because they have him on tape as saying he is not “strong on the economy”?
Is it patriotic Mr. Biden to follow this line of comedy, when the financial advisors of Mr. Obama are part of the mortgage industry in trouble? Have we told all these poor African Americans that are loosing their mortgages that Mr. Mud is in a 22 room mansion from his part in this deception, Mr. “No Spin” Orielly? You know what, maybe you rich folks need to loose some more money? Well of course Mr. Biden wants us to believe it is patriotic to pay more taxes, the Democrats and their financial advisors just completed the biggest rip off in criminal history, and will think they can get away with it?
We will not falter, we will not fail, we will not stop until we get these Democrats out of office and expose them for what they are. We need to stop experimenting with government guarantees of financial instruments, if we want to continue as We the People?
And by the way Sarah, when Joe Biden pulls some past audio out of the hat, just tell him you’ll get back to him, he has a habit of pulling quoutes out of context (if you don’t have an answer)? Even though Rush Limbaugh had some medical problems, he is still sounding the Paul Revere sound of the Commies are Coming? We had better listen, and Mr. Obama’s use of Rush and his audio taken out of context in order to create racial discord is not only alarming, but very revealing about the depths of contempt held by this politician and his party, which remains silent during these despicable tactics?
Guess what industry is next on the Democratic radar? Your medical system, and they are drooling over the prospects of killing our fathers and mothers with poor medical care, in order to get those death taxes, and plunder medical companies under the guise of failures due to financial mismanagement? Snap out of it folks?
I LOVE YOU, JOE BIDEN!