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.
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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.
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