Sep

24

Statistics and political rhetoric

Filed Under News, Random Thoughts 

Lincoln recently put a link on his blog to a post on EdWired about computer visualizations of text. Actually the site that does these visualizations will do them for nearly any data set. One of the highlights I found quite interesting was the visualization set for the recent party conventions.

I decided to try something. I pulled up a word tree of Obama’s convention speech and one of McCain’s speech. I then searched for the word “I” in each speech.  The results intrigue me. McCain uses “I” more often, but it is most frequently followed by “was” and “know.” Obama most frequently said “I will.”

Obama and McCain's use of I

Obama and McCain's use of "I"

This seems to bolster the sense that Obama can say little about his past that wouldn’t disqualify him for public office, and that McCain has had a storied past with lots of varied experience. Obama’s emphais on the future may be not only politically shrewd, but practically necessary. Further, his characterization of McCain as a relic of the past seems justified by McCain’s own rhetoric.

There is the problem, however, of politicians saying “I will” (or “I will not”). McCain will need to get away from his historical narrative at some point, but the alternative is not Obama’s grand declarations of future accomplishments. Politicians promise much during campaigns, but the return on their promises is usually pretty poor.

I think a stronger rhetorical stance for a presidential candidate would emphasize statements of moral fact. If Senator McCain wanted to highlight future policies, but do so without making promises that political necessity might later overturn (George H.W. Bush, anyone?), he could cast his ideas this way: “We should ________,” or, “We ought to _______.” By doing so, he doesn’t actually promise anything, but instead identifies the “right” course of action.

Of course, McCain may be prone to overdo this kind of rhetoric. William McGurn and John Fund both recently noted in the Wall Street Journal that McCain already tends to shoot from the hip for moral judgments. If he’s going to adopt the rhetoric of moral principle (as opposed to Obama’s “ruthless pragmatism“), he needs to decide what he thinks–or at least what he wants people to think that he thinks–and stick to it.  I think he would be much more convincing.

Comments

One Response to “Statistics and political rhetoric”

  1. Austin on September 25th, 2008 12:40 pm

    Of course, McCain may be prone to overdo this kind of rhetoric. William McGurn and John Fund both recently noted in the Wall Street Journal that McCain already tends to shoot from the hip for moral judgments.

    That’s interesting, because recently I’ve read both David Brooks and George Will make similar points: basically that John McCain doesn’t operate by political theory so must as attempt to cast everything as a moral crusade.

    I think they’re right, and it’s illustrated by yesterday’s declaration that he is going to suspend his campaign until Congress works out the economic crisis.

    By the way, your text analysis reminded me of this software analysis of “spin”:

    Each of the candidates had made speeches containing very high and very low levels of spin, according to Skillicorn’s program, depending on the occasion. In general though, Obama’s speeches contain considerably higher spin than either McCain or Clinton. For example, for their speeches accepting their party’s nomination for president, Obama’s speech scored a spin value of 6.7 - where 0 is the average level of spin within all the political speeches analysed, and positive values represent higher spin. In contrast, McCain’s speech scored -7.58, while Hillary Clinton’s speech at the Democratic National Convention scored 0.15. Skillicorn also found that Sarah Palin’s speeches contain slightly more spin than average.

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