4
10
2004
Debating the debate
Wes has a good and balanced summary of the strengths and weaknesses of Bush’s and Kerry’s performances in last Thursday’s presidential debate. He has a lot to say about the linguistic devices used by each candidate and the political strategies that probably informed their use.
I never really thought highly of presidential debates, which, I felt, were too subject to gimmicks, style and appearances. However, I have recently come to believe that their value comes from seeing the candidates alone, live in front of the camera—free from advisors, sound bites, and spin.
Philip linked to an interesting Excel application: a word-frequency analysis of what each candidate said during the debate. 
Ooh, getting political, eh? It’s unavoidable, innit?
Anyhow, I’m a bit late to the party here, but I just wanted to show you the new tool I just whipped up for everyone’s political-tea-reading needs (mainly my own, but your post showed that there are other hopelessly anal-ytical folks out there, yay): a debate phrase-frequency analyzer.
I had written the Perl script that munges transcripts within hours of the first debate, but didn’t get around to writing the pretty PHP interface until just now. I figure I’ll paste in new debate transcripts as they arise.
Of course, any perceived truths in these charts are highly subjective, but they’re still kind of fun. Perhaps most telling is the three-word-phrase count from the first Bush/Kerry debate. Bush’s top phrase is “a free Iraq” (12 times), while Kerry’s is “the United States” (19 times). (Oddly, Bush never says “the United States”.) Where are they trying to draw our focus, one might wonder.
Kerry talks a lot about being “in the world” (11 times — he does not mention not being of the world, however) and clearly wants to talk about the future: “I’m going to” (11 times), “we need to” (9 times), “we have to” (6 times), “we can do” (6 times), etc.
Bush would rather talk about the “war on terror” (10 times), “Kim Jong Il” (7 times), and “weapons of mass” destruction (6 times), but mentions “Osama bin Laden” half as much as Kerry (4 times to Kerry’s 8). You can see what they want you to think about.
Not that any of this is a surprise in the least. There’s no need to sift through the tea leaves when each candidate’s message is rather obvious even without this frequency analysis.
Very nice, Mr Stadler. Please report to the Vice Principal’s office immediately.