them's countin' words

We have also found evidence to suggest that McCain and Obama have different thinking styles. Whereas McCain tends to be more categorical in his thinking, Obama is more fluid or contextual in the ways he approaches problems. Categorical thinking involves the use of concrete nouns and their associated articles (a, an, the) and suggests that the person is approaching a problem by breaking it down into its component parts and attempting to put it in meaningful categories. Fluid or contextual thinking involves a higher rate of verbs and associated parts of speech (such as gerunds and adverbs).

From James W. Pennebaker's word count analysis of last night's debate, posted this morning on his blog, Wordwatchers.

Pennebaker's research is grounded in the assumption that "the ways that individuals talk and write provide windows into their emotional and cognitive worlds." He as his colleagues Roger J. Booth and Martha E. Francis have developed the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) application, a text analysis software program that quantifies word usage, from which they then conduct further analysis.

Pennebaker's post regarding Summary Comparisons of the Candidates’ Language in Speeches and Interviews is particularly interesting. He's also the subject of He Counts Your Words (Even Those Pronouns) in Tuesday's New York Times.

FUD, illustrated

FUD: Fear, uncertainty and doubt. A tactic of rhetoric and fallacy used in sales, marketing, public relations and politics. FUD is generally a strategic attempt to influence public perception by disseminating negative (and vague) information.

Illustrated:

FUDer

MotherFUDer

true mavericks

Samuel Augustus Maverick: A Bostonian who got into trouble with the law over his agitation for the rights of indentured servants. Maverick headed for Texas in the 1800s where he became known for not branding his cattle. He was more interested in keeping track of the land he owned than the livestock on it; unbranded cattle, then, were called “Maverick’s.” The name came to mean anyone who didn’t bear another’s brand.

Fontaine Maury Maverick: A two-term congressman and a mayor of San Antonio who lost his mayoral re-election bid when conservatives labeled him a Communist. He served in the Roosevelt administration on the Smaller War Plants Corporation and came up with the term “gobbledygook” in frustration at the convoluted language of bureaucrats.

Maury Maverick Jr.: A firebrand civil libertarian and lawyer who defended draft resisters, atheists and others scorned by society. He served in the Texas Legislature during the McCarthy era and wrote fiery columns for The San Antonio Express-News. His final column, published on Feb. 2, 2003, just after he died at 82, was an attack on the coming war in Iraq.

Terrellita Maverick: A sister of Maury Jr., Terrellita is a member emeritus of the board of the San Antonio chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas. She's quoted as saying: “I’m just enraged that McCain calls himself a maverick, ... [he] is in no way a maverick, in uppercase or lowercase.

“It’s just incredible — the nerve! — to suggest that he’s not part of that Republican herd. Every time we hear it, all my children and I and all my family shrink a little and say, ‘Oh, my God, he said it again.’

“He’s a Republican,” she said. “He’s branded.”

Clipped and paraphrased from today's New York Times piece on the Mavericks of Texas, who give us the word "Maverick", and are known as a family with a "long history of association with liberalism and progressive ideals".

speaking of keating

Sometime today the Obama for America Campaign posted a teaser trailer on YouTube designed to drive folks to keatingeconomics.com, a site that the campaign is hosting, which promises a "full documentary" on "John McCain and the Making of the Economic Crisis" at 12 PM Eastern.

Stay tuned.

chill the f* out. he's got it.

embiggen »

Either way, according to the economists, it would be difficult to do much worse than George Bush. The respondents give Mr Bush a dismal average of 1.7 on our five-point scale for his economic management. Eighty-two per cent thought Mr Bush’s record was bad or very bad; only 1% thought it was very good.

The Democrats were overwhelmingly negative, but nearly every respondent viewed Mr Bush’s record unfavourably. Half of Republican respondents thought Mr Bush deserves only a 2. “The minimum rating of one severely overestimates the quality of Bush’s economic policies,” says one non-aligned economist.

Examining the candidates in the 2 October Economist.

The Economist surveyed "683 research associates of the National Bureau of Economic Research, America’s premier association of applied academic economists," and found that "eighty per cent of respondents and no fewer than 71% of those who do not cleave to either main party say Mr Obama has a better grasp of economics. Even among Republicans Mr Obama has the edge: 46% versus 23% say Mr Obama has the better grasp of the subject."

via @kellywilliams

we pause this blog for a brief history lesson

The Keating Five were five United States Senators accused of corruption in 1989, igniting a major political scandal as part of the larger Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The five senators, Alan Cranston (D-CA), Dennis DeConcini (D-AZ), John Glenn (D-OH), John McCain (R-AZ), and Donald W. Riegle (D-MI), were accused of improperly aiding Charles H. Keating, Jr., chairman of the failed Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, which was the target of an investigation by the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB).

The result of the collapse of Lincoln Savings and Loan was that 21,000 mostly elderly investors lost their life savings. After a lengthy investigation, the Senate Ethics Committee determined in 1991 that Alan Cranston, Dennis DeConcini, and Donald Riegle had substantially and improperly interfered with the FHLBB in its investigation of Lincoln Savings. Senators John Glenn and John McCain were cleared of having acted improperly but were criticized for having exercised "poor judgment".

(...)

The U.S. Savings and Loan crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s was the failure of 747 savings and loan associations (S&Ls) in the United States. The ultimate cost of the crisis is estimated to have totaled around $160.1 billion, about $124.6 billion of which was directly paid for by the U.S. taxpayer.

The accompanying slowdown in the finance industry and the real estate market may have been a contributing cause of the 1990-1991 economic recession. Between 1986 and 1991, the number of new homes constructed per year dropped from 1.8 million to 1 million, the lowest rate since World War II.

From Wikipedia.

Update: Rolling Stone's piece on the Make-believe Maverick goes into more details regarding McCain's involvement in the Keating Scandal.

wordles apart

I'm sure someone else has already done this somewhere else, but I wanted to see for myself.

What follows are word clouds generated by Wordle which give "greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text".

These word clouds were created from the texts of the acceptance speeches delivered by our presidential candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain.

The text of each speech was lifted from two of four (thanks, Anne!). I used the same presentation style for each and executed them in black and white so as not to unfairly bias the presentation of either one.

Embiggen Barack Obama's Wordle »

Embiggen John McCain's Wordle »

all class, part 2.

At least I don’t plaster on the make-up like a trollop, you c***.

John McCain's response to his wife Cindy, before an audience of reporters and two staffers in 1992, when she teased him about his thinning hair, as related by the New York Review of Books and cited by The Sunday Times (of London).

Had enough of John McCain? No? Here's an earful that's well worth reading, written by an Arizona journalist who followed the politician for many years »