a content comparison of the verbal speeches delivered
by george herbert walker bush (1992) and george walker bush (2000)

The data for this study was drawn from the transcriptions of verbal speeches given by George Herbert Walker Bush in the 1992 presidential campaign and those of his son, George Walker Bush, during the 2000 presidential campaign.

The 1992 George Herbert Walker Bush campaign speeches were collected from the electronic presidential resource archive associated with the George Bush Presidential Library at Texas A&M University. This digital archive contains all of the President’s speeches, statements, papers and relevant documents organized by date. Each speech was selected from among the archived documents, and converted into a Microsoft Word document. Special care was taken to remove any introductory remarks or any comments by other sources contained within the documents, but the information about the setting for the speech was included.

Next, the files were stripped of their header information, leaving only the actual spoken words of the President. Each of these files was saved into a Text-Only format. Once this grouping of files was collected, each was converted into a DICTION input formatted document for the purposes of analysis.

The 2000 George Walker Bush campaign speeches were drawn from the Stanford University Election Ebook, In Their Own Words. This sourcebook contains the text of each public speech by George W. Bush and Al Gore delivered between June 1 and October 7, 2000, organized by topic. The texts of the speeches are presented in their entirety, with the exception of the candidates’ opening greetings and other non-substantive artifacts. The Ebook also contains the television commercials (embedded in Quicktime format) of each candidate and their respective parties during the same period.

Although the commercials are beyond the scope of this study, their presence may prove invaluable in secondary studies involving candidate voice in the media. For each chapter, we reverse the order in which readers encounter each candidate’s materials.

For each of Governor Bush’s speeches, the text was extracted and placed into a Microsoft Word document. This batch of files served as a reference for later analysis, allowing the researcher to refer back to the individual files and see when, where and how a particular speech was delivered.

Next, a second batch of files was constructed by stripping out the header information and saving each speech individually as a text-only document. Finally, each of these files was converted in a DICTION input file to allow the software to construct a single verbal narrative for the entire campaign.

For both candidates, the texts of presidential debates was considered as an additional source of information and then discarded. The format of presidential debates tends to force candidates to frame their opinions and speech in response to the questions posed to them. Since the goal of this study was to study how each Bush attempted to present himself, the debates were judged too unreliable for this purpose. Too many intervening variables can influence these debates, such as different moderators and even different debate opponents. President Bush debated then-Governor Bill Clinton, and Governor Bush debated then-Vice President Al Gore. Though both of these men served in the same administration, the difference in debate style and presentation format of these two opponents is decidedly different. Clinton often leaned on his tremendous personal charisma to intimidate his opponents, a strategy that was not often used (nor likely often available) to Gore.

In all, there were 148 campaign speeches collected for President Bush and 144 speeches collected for Governor Bush.

After compiling all of the speeches into their respective master files, the files were then analyzed using the computer program DICTION, which reviews verbal textual passages looking for particular word groupings. Using a more than 10,000 words drawn from its internal dictionaries, the software package classifies uses of particular words into five master variable: Certainty, Optimism, Activity, Realism, and Commonality.

The foundation of the software is the categorization of key word counts into 35 mutually exclusive categories. A list and brief description of these variables appears below:

A. Certainty - resoluteness and firmness.

1. Tenacity
2. Leveling
3. Collectives
4. Insistence
5. Numerical Terms
6. Ambivalence
7. Self-Reference
8. Variety


B. Optimism - highlighting the positive

1. Praise
2. Satisfaction
3. Inspiration
4. Blame
5. Hardship
6. Denial


C. Activity - references to movement, change

1. Aggression
2. Accomplishment
3. Communication
4. Motion
5. Cognitive Terms
6. Passivity
7. Embellishment


D. Realism - tangible references to everyday life

1. Familiarity
2. Spatial Awareness
3. Temporal Awareness
4. Present Concern
5. Human Interest
6. Concreteness
7. Past Concern
8. Complexity


E. Commonality - language of connecting people

1. Centrality
2. Cooperation
3. Rapport
4. Diversity
5. Exclusion
6. Liberation

An extended explanation of DICTION’s origins and abilities can be found in Roderick Hart’s Campaign Talk: Why Elections Are Good For Us.

After receiving the DICTION scores, the means of the scores were computed and ranked in descending order. A Spearman’s Rho test was conducted to correlate the differences in each man’s scores.

In addition, several other textual observations were collected, and are discussed at length in the results section.

Introduction and Literature Review

Methodology

Results

Discussion

Reference List