Political Wordle

Tomorrow I am giving a riveting lecture on 'unobtrusive social research methods.' Avoiding most of the content that may give this observation more legitimacy, (what would be the fun in making a legitimate generalization, anyways?) here is one of my examples...

Below are the word clouds (made at wordle.net) for the presidential inauguration speeches back through Clinton's first round (ordered from newest to oldest). These are essentially word usage frequency counts, bigger words are used more often. The change from Bush #1 to Bush #2 is very interesting in terms his focus. Also, it would seem that the dem. guys have a bigger focus on active things: today, time, now, work, must, new, and generation look to be popular. Bush looks to focus more on national identity kind of stuff: story, nation, country, promise, common, freedom, courage, citizens, character, liberty, history, cause, free, hopes and so on. This is pretty interesting (i think). It doesn't mean, necessarily, that Bush didn't care about being active and taking care of thing, nor that the Dem. guys didn't care about national identity. It could be that the way they communicated and envisioned this in action was different, but they thought they were doing the same thing. Who knows.

Either way, the difference in their focus in their speech is interesting....

Obama

Bush's #2

Bush's #1

Clinton's #2

Clinton's #1