I downloaded the transcripts of all of Obama and McCain’s speeches from their respective official websites from March 25th, 2008 to the present and then put them each into Wordle.
Wordle gives greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.
I used 51 speeches by McCain and 61 by Obama.
McCain’s site only had transcripts from March 25th to the present and I figured that was plenty of data for my purposes.
Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, wondered why someone wasn’t doing something that would give American voters useful and unbiased information about which candidate has the best plans for the economy.
Then he realized that he was someone.
He commissioned a survey of over 500 economists, drawn from members of the American Economic Association, a nonpolitical group, that had previously agreed to be surveyed on economic questions.
The economists were asked to rank the most important economic issues and pick which candidate they thought would do the best job on those issues.
Here are the results:
| Rank | Issues | Obama | McCain | No Diff. |
| 1 | Education | 59% | 14% | 27% |
| 2 | Health care | 65% | 20% | 15% |
| 3 | International trade | 26% | 51% | 23% |
| 4 | Energy | 61% | 22% | 17% |
| 5 | Encouraging Technology/innovation | 43% | 23% | 34% |
| 6 | Wars and homeland security | 58% | 30% | 11% |
| 7 | Mortgage/housing crisis | 41% | 18% | 41% |
| 8 | Social Security | 40% | 24% | 35% |
| 9 | Environmental policy | 72% | 9% | 19% |
| 10 | Reducing the deficit | 37% | 29% | 33% |
| 11 | Immigration | 33% | 29% | 38% |
| 12 | Increasing taxes on wealthy | 79% | 14% | 7% |
| 13 | Reducing waste in government | 16% | 38% | 46% |
Adams is quick to point out that even though economists favour Obama in 11 of 13 of the most important issues (as decided by the survey) 48% of economists are Democrats and only 17% are Republicans.
It makes you wonder, are liberals more likely to go into economics, or are economists more likely to become liberals? Or is it just the simple fact that educated folks tend to be more progressive?
You can check out the full report (in Power Point format).
When John McCain met Sarah Palin for the first time, you have to wonder, did he think Hey, you remind me of someone.
Here’s a little SNL clip from the weekend of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler doing Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton.