09:45 am
Words Matter
Interesting bubble graph showing which words the candidates used during the Conventions:
What I found most interesting is that the Republicans never uttered Dick Cheney’s name once, nor did they ever talk about “four more years.” The Democrats mentioned Bush nearly seven times as often as the Republicans did.
I knew the Republicans would run away from Bush. They have to. But I didn’t expect them to do it to the degree they have.
The last thing I would note is how infrequently foreign policy was mentioned (unless you count energy, but most of the time candidates were talking about American energy independence). Only four topics made the cut — Iran, Iraq, “war,” and “terror(ism)/terrorist(s).” The Democrats spoke of these issues 64 times, the Republicans 46 times (although the numbers may have been more even had Russia-Georgia been included — Obama mentioned it at least once, and virtually every Republican speaker highlighted it).
What’s striking is what’s not on the list: torture (which I believe only Bill Richardson and Rudy Giuliani mentioned, and in the case of Giuliani, it was in reference to John McCain), Afghanistan, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, Sudan, democracy, human rights, climate change/global warming.
That’s not to say that some of these issues were not covered — they just didn’t make the cut for the graph. It’s therefore hard to say whether the speakers did not discuss foreign policy or the graph has a built in bias against those issues.
Hat tip: Switchblog