Cliché alert: Yes We Did!

Election night at Grant Park was nearly overwhelming. The reaction of the huge (125k people strong) crowd, the exceptional speeches by both McCain and Obama, and the step forward socially made for an unbelievable night.

I allowed myself to be positive and optimistic for one night, but the next day I was reminded that America is still only taking baby steps. While some bigots, such as Elizabeth Dole, were replaced, many others were not, such as Michelle Bachmann. Let's not forget the most depressing, telltale sign: proposition 8 was passed in California.

What an exciting week we have ahead of us

As time runs short 'til Election Day, we find ourselves at a seemingly bright outlook, a much brighter outlook than I had planned on, anyways.

Obama may not be the best candidate ever (how vague can I be here, right?), but he is leaps and bounds ahead of what I see coming from the current GOP.

It's been very entertaining to watch the Republican campaign of Senator McCain and Gov. Palin tear itself apart. Apparently, McCain and Palin barely speak to each other, and there have even been remarks about her going "rogue" lately, she and her supporters are apparently grooming her for a later run in politics and a possible presidential campaign. Now there's a scary thought - can you imagine the colossal step backwards the country would be taking?

But those thoughts are best left for crossing that bridge, and hoping that the American people can cross that bridge without falling off, when we get there.

Seven days now til election day. While I hold no grand delusions of this intangible "hope" or "change" that Obama's campaign has for sale, I do think that he will be far and away the better choice for this country's presidency. He seems to exude calm and rationality, and here's hoping that this is the real Obama.

Word frequency: debate edition

Mark Liberman over at Language Log put up a great word frequency comparison for the Presidential debates, and I won't rehash the story too much, here is the part I found particularly interesting...

Here's some more data — a comparison of counts across all three debates for if (at least according to the CNN transcripts):

(if)	Obama	McCain
Debate 1	20	19
Debate 2	37	22
Debate 3	44	14

And for some:

(some)	Obama	McCain
Debate 1	25	6
Debate 2	22	20
Debate 3	34	11

Given a set of observations like this, we could come to several different sorts of conclusions.

Maybe it's a meaningless, random statistical fluctuation. After all, there are lots of words, and people vary randomly in how often they choose different words on different occasions, and the way I've gone about this analysis is likely to turn up some differences that arise purely by chance.

Then again, maybe the difference (between individuals or across occasions) is real, but reflects a stylistic difference in the way messages are framed (e.g. "If we want to do X, we need Y" versus "In order to do X, we need Y"), rather than a difference in the underlying distribution of messages. If the difference is a stylistic one, it might be a stable feature of the different individuals involved, or it might reflect a more temporary priming effect, whether lexical or semantic or rhetorical.

Or perhaps the observation reflects a genuine difference in the kinds of ideas that the two candidates are presenting, or at least the spin they want to put on these ideas.

Certainly the first solution, statistical fluctuation is a probability, and I don't have the tools to rule it out. I do think stylistic differences contribute to this though. McCain wants his campaign to appear to take a hard line on some issues - first one that comes to mind might be the issue of talking to Iran only with preconditions:

McCain - "We will only talk with Iran with preconditions in place."
Obama - "If the situation warrants it, we may have to talk with Iran without preconditions."

(note that I have no idea if this is exactly what was said, but just providing an example of what I think they might be saying)

But I think the kind of ideas they're presenting bleeds into the stylistic issue. I don't think these two solutions are greatly seperated - if the Obama is the kind of person that will review all of the information time and time again to make a good decision on an issue, he might like to qualify it by using "if" conditions and the like. McCain may be close to the hotheaded candidate that the left is trying to portray him as, and he may be sure enough of himself to make those snap decisions, and is happy to portray himself as overly assertive. After all, quite a few Americans will find that a strength, rather than a weakness, and that's a discomforting thought.