Kerry and Bush speak at the end of their first presidential debate. Photograph: Jim Bourg/Reuters
Bloggers are a resourceful bunch: they like nothing better than to "fact check [insert name of candidate or journalist]'s ass".
MIT Media Lab graduate student Cameron Marlow has done wonders with Perl to create a tool to help bloggers analyse transcripts of the presidential debates. Just plug in a well-worn phrase - say, "war on terror" - and up pops a phrase count (Bush 11, Kerry 7, for the record).
Marlow lists the candidates' top 25 phrases during the first Bush-Kerry clash, and repeats the exercise for last night's vice-presidential debate: Cheney's top three phases were Saddam Hussein (11), fact of the matter (10) and United States (10), while Edwards' were John Kerry (36), American people (28) and tax cuts (16).
For more analysis of the candidates linguistic skills, see Language Log, which finds that John Kerry's sentences are, on average, 17.7% longer than George Bush's. Language Log's sober analysis is that, of four reasons for the statistic: "First, Kerry might have talked faster. Second, he might have used shorter pauses. Third, he might have paused less often. Fourth, he might have used intrinsically shorter words", the second is the key factor, sidestepping the well-worn debate over whether Bush is stupid, as evinced by this piece in Slate.Trackback: http://tb.donews.net/TrackBack.aspx?PostId=123214