US presidential election spin — recent speeches

As promised, I’ve updated the plot of candidate spin to reflect only the speeches given in March.

The significance of this is that spin is always relative to some set of similar documents; and, in the Democratic campaign at least, the substance and tone of the conversation has changed substantially in the past few weeks. All candidates have moved away from presenting themselves as people to presenting their policies (McCain is back talking about himself, but this isn’t captured in this set of speeches).

9 is Obama’s race speech, 10 is his Iraq speech.

McCain still shows low levels of spin. However, the position of Obama and Clinton has largely reversed. Clinton shows high levels of spin, suggesting that her policy speeches are being simplified from the way she would usually speak (which is plausible). Obama continues to increase his level of first-person singular pronoun use, suggesting that he remains confident that he has won the nomination, despite the media’s attempts to keep stirring the pot.