John McCain vs. Barack Obama (Election Night Speeches)

Last night, US president-elect Obama gave a victory speech in Chicago in front of a 100,000+ joyous crowd in Grant Park; McCain conceded in Phoenix on the back lawn of a luxury hotel with an at times bitter audience of 7,000. I followed the same methodology for their speeches as with the first, second and third presidential debates and the vice presidential debate; you can find some more detail about my methodology there. So let's start with the bubble graph displaying length of words, sentences as well as number of words:



Unsurprisingly, McCain kept it short in every way I measured. Using Wordle, I made all-inclusive word clouds.

John McCain





Barack Obama



McCain mentioned Obama quite a few times, he was after all conceding defeat. As the winner, Obama was looking more ahead, only mentioning his opponent in passing. McCain had many dominant words, esp. campaign, country, thank and variants on America. Obama was more focused with America, tonight, people and new standing out only.

Obama vs. McCain vs. Palin vs. Biden in the Last Month: Details

A post on the FiveThirtyEight.com blog (Google Traffic Suggests McCain Not Grabbing Voters' Attention) today looked up the Google-popularity of McCain and Obama, using Google Trends. The author wondered about the context of the Obama searches: maybe they were people looking for dirt, i.e., "proof" for the many slanderous allegations? Well, there's a way to a least get an idea of that and more: use Google Insights for Search
—my standard analysis tool.



I also included Palin and Biden to complete the presidential election picture. This graph showed again that Obama has been in the lead for the past month. Palin at times peaked higher than Obama and was most of the time more Google-popular than McCain. Except for his vice presidential debate, Biden led a quiet life out of the big spotlight ;-) Now, let's have a look at the details underlying this graph. First, the geographical differences for the candidates; then the context of the candidates' searches.
I started with Obama's regional search patterns:



The following states were the most interested in him: New Mexico, Colorado and North Carolina. The remainder of the top 10 were also seen as battleground states at one time or another, except of course the District of Columbia and Illinois. How was McCain's list?



Ohio, New Mexico and Pennsylvania led the top 10. Further down though, the battleground states didn't dominate with McCain: only three more. Furthermore, his home state Arizona wasn't in the top 10. Interesting... Next: Palin.



Her top three was made up of Alaska, Vermont and Oregon: all non-battleground states. In the remaining seven there was similarly only one state that could be called a battleground (Colorado). This seemed to point at her appeal being more as a celebrity than in the strict context of the campaign. Finally, where was Biden the most searched?



Delaware, Vermont and Alaska led his list. Maybe a lot of people in Alaska were trying to find out what their governor was up against? The only battleground state the Democratic VP candidate was Google-popular: Pennsylvania. he has been campaigning a lot there if I'm not mistaken.

In conclusion, Obama was the one who evoked he highest interest in the battleground states. That being said, in what light was he being searched: positive or negative? Here's the list of most common search terms for Obama:



The top 10 was basically positive with searches focusing on the race, polls and debates. The second list on the right shows the "rising" searches, i.e., searches that saw the fastest growth spurt but were not in the top 10. Nos. 4-8 were rather negative: (false) accusations of him not being qualified in a legal sense to run, the ACORN voter registration fraud allegations, the tenuous connection with a '60s terrorist. All in all, the rising searches displayed a half positive (Powell, ...), half negative interest. Republican mud-slinging had only a limited impact. On to his opponent, McCain:



His top 10 was similar to Obama: positive. The "risers" were also all basically positive. Next, Palin.



Five of her top 10 searches related to Tina Fey's parody of her on Saturday Night Live. I don't think that can be classified unequivocally as positive. The other five were the typical contexts of the campaign, debate, etc. When it came to rising searches, about half of them to had a connection with SNL. Last but not least ;-) , Senator Biden...



A basic, positive top 10 was accompanied by as much as four rising searches about the SNL sketch parodying the VP debate.

Clearly, the searches were mostly about the campaign except for some following up on accusations against Obama and regarding the Palin SNL saga.

John McCain vs. Barack Obama vs. Bob Schieffer

The third and last US presidential debate took place tonight at Hofstra University in Hempstead, NY. I started by following the same methodology as with the first and second debates and the vice presidential debate, amended regarding Wordle by my 10-5-08 post. So let's start with the bubble graph displaying length of words, sentences as well as number of words:



As usual, the moderator (Schieffer) spoke far less. Obama tended to use longer sentences. I did an extra analysis again, this time focusing on speaking turns and the number of words and sentences per turn:



McCain had the most speaking turns, followed closely by Schieffer. Obama clearly had the least. However, Obama used a lot more words per turn than McCain. Schieffer came in dead last as a moderator should. It seems to me that this pattern was the result of McCain interrupting Obama a lot and Schieffer attempting to stop this. In other words, McCain was more aggressive, pushy.

Next, the by now traditional word clouds.

John McCain





Barack Obama





Bob Schieffer



OK, now what did it all mean? McCain was talking most about Obama—hey, he did call him "Sen." at least—followed by America, and the trio of need, going and now. He did not once use his opponent's first name, Barack: he didn't want to portray him too much as a human being, I suppose? Obama on the other hand used John 8 times, often by itself. Otherwise, his biggest words were going and think. People, now and make came next. Only then do we get down to McCain, health and want. Obama was talking more to the voters, explaining policy. Finally, Schieffer used, of course, Sen. the most but it was more accompanied by McCain than Obama. This reinforced our impression that he was trying to reign McCain in a bit. One more funny thing: Schieffer's catch phrase is "all right": he used it 17 times hence the prominence of right in his word cloud (all is a common word that is filtered out by Wordle).

Barack Obama vs. John McCain vs. Audience vs. Tom Brokaw

The second US presidential debate took place tonight at Belmont University in Nashville, TN. I followed the same methodology as with the first debate and the vice presidential debate, amended regarding Wordle by my 10-5-08 post. So let's start with the bubble graph displaying length of words, sentences as well as number of words:



Obama and McCain were again close though the latter used a bit shorter sentences. Remarkably, the audience questions contained the longest words, more even than Brokaw's. The moderator also spoke about twice as much as his colleague Jim Lehrer did in the first debate. While splitting up the text in the different speakers' parts, something caught my eye: Brokaw seemed to thank McCain a lot but not Obama. Just to make sure, I counted all speakers' instances of thanking somebody:



What stood out on this measure? McCain made it a point to thank the audience speakers and secondly thanked Brokaw quite a few times. He even thanked Obama 1.5 times—I counted a sarcastic "thank you" only half. Maybe McCain's expressions of gratitude reflected his being more formal and/or older? Or maybe he was trying to counter his rather stern if not grumpy behavior during the first debate? Obama on the other hand didn't thank many people. He thanked two audience questioners but was mostly business. He didn't thank McCain once. Maybe that was a reaction to criticism that he was bending over backwards to him too much during the first debate? Brokaw thanked McCain a lot more than Obama but neglected the audience too.

Finally, we made the "word clouds" again.

Barack Obama





John McCain





Audience





Tom Brokaw



I'll conclude with a few quick observations. Obama's no. 1 word tonight was "going," followed by "got," "Sen." and "McCain." Policywise, "health" and "energy" stood out. As for McCain, "know" was tops—invocations of experience? Then came "going," "Obama" and esp. "America(n)(s)." The audience very much stressed "economic"—remember "It's the economy, stupid!" from Clinton's first presidential campaign? As expected, Brokaw said "Sen." most, followed by "McCain" and then "Obama."

Sarah Palin vs. Joe Biden vs. Glen Ifill

I'm afraid that part 3 of the Democratic Party vs. Republican Party vs. Green Party vs. Libertarian Party vs. Constitution Party series of posts will have to wait till tomorrow. Tonight I watched the vice presidential debate at Washington University in St. Louis and of course I want to present you with my word analysis again (see previous posts on the first presidential debate and the convention speeches). I found the transcript and separated out the words spoken by Palin, Biden and moderator Ifill. Let's start with the bubble graph in which I summarize how many words, sentences and characters (excl. spaces) each speaker used:



Ifill didn't use a lot of words which makes sense as she was the moderator. However, her words were notably longer even though she spoke in short sentences. This seems a bit odd at first. The explanation lies in her word choice as moderator: her most common words were "governor" and "senator" (as we'll see below). Palin and Biden were very similar in style though Palin did use longer sentences. I'm not sure what that could mean.

Next, using Wordle, I again made a "word cloud" of each of the debate contributions.

Sarah Palin




Joe Biden




Glen Ifill


Peculiarly, Palin's most common word was "also." My impression was that at times she sort of went on and on, just listing talking points, which then maybe were loosely connected by the word "also"... Then came "going," maybe due to her more colloquial style? Also frequent was "John" or "McCain," in other words she was praising and invoking him a lot. Biden's most common word was "John" followed by "McCain," highlighting his not addressing Palin as much as McCain as well as his familiarity with his fellow senator. Then came "going." Maybe he was more colloquial in his style than I realized? Or maybe in both cases they were talking about their team's plans and therefore looking at the near future? Biden also used "Barack" and "Obama" many times, it seems to me when he was stressing their team effort. Finally, Ifill's most common word was "governor" (sometimes abbreviated as "gov." in the transcript: this should be added to the full term's number actually). She did use it more than "senator" or "sen." (no. 2), maybe pointing at the fact that she was addressing Palin more than Biden?


Update 11-4-08: For Palin's use of "also," see the post on the Language Log blog. For the transcript I used, see CNN. "Maverick" really only appears 15 times in it: 9 times for Biden and 6 times for Palin—hard to believe, isn't it?


Update 10-5-08: As I explain in this new post, Wordle has a lot more settings than I was aware of. Here are the improved, "corrected" word clouds.

Sarah Palin (improved)



Joe Biden (improved)



Glen Ifill (improved)

Barack Obama vs. John McCain vs. Jim Lehrer

Tonight, I watched the first presidential candidates' debate at "Ole Miss" (University of Mississipi, Oxford). I thought I'd do the same thing I did for the convention speeches with the specific words uttered by Obama, McCain and—why not?—moderator Lehrer. I looked how many words they used. Also, how many sentences and characters (excl. spaces) did the individual debate parts have? I summarized these three measures in a bubble graph:



Lehrer obviously had much less to say than Obama and McCain who ended up with rather similar measures. I guess you could say that McCain used fewer but longer words in shorter sentences than Obama...

Then, using Wordle, I made a "word cloud" each of the debate contributions.

Barack Obama



John McCain



Jim Lehrer


As expected, because Lehrer was the moderator, words such as "senator," both their last names, "minutes" and "question" were prominent. Obama's most frequently used words were "going" (action sentences?), "think" (not impulsive, rash... like McCain?), "make" (constructive, tangible?) and "now" (no living in the past?). McCain's commonest words were "senator" and "know": stressing his experience perhaps? Then came "Obama" (more attacks on the person?) followed by "United States" (patriotism?), "want" (forcefulness?) and "spending" (Republican hot issue of cutting spending). These were just my initial associations of course, I wonder what a linguist would think of these patterns.


Update 10-5-08: As I explain in this new post, Wordle has a lot more settings than I was aware of. Here are the improved, "corrected" word clouds.

Barack Obama (improved)



John McCain (improved)



Jim Lehrer (improved)