Mostly About Me

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In a Political Animal entry dated 9.6, Hilzoy says that "one thing that struck me [about John McCain's acceptance speech two nights ago] was the irony of a candidate who relentlessly positions himself as a selfless servant of the nation ('I wasn't my own man anymore -- I was my country's'), and then allocates such a large share of his convention speech to talking about himself.

"I can understand the need for Sarah Palin to dedicate time in her speech to introduce herself to the nation, given that she was an unknown quantity on the political scene at that point (notwithstanding the frenzy of Google searches over the last seven days). But at 72, after a long career in Washington, after a widely-televised campaign, and at the end of a convention in which an entire day had been dedicated to answering the 'who is John McCain?' question, it seems a little unusual for McCain to use his most precious block of national TV airtime to essentially read aloud from his memoirs, saying comparatively little about the country or about his platform.

"Here is an admittedly simplistic way of looking at it based on analysis of the full transcript of the speech found on his campaign website. There were a total of 271 sentences in the speech, not including the 'thankyouthankyouthankyouallsomuchthankyou' before he started and the 'joinmejoinmefightwithmejoinmefightwithme' bit in the final minute or so.

"Of those 271 sentences, a remarkable 147 (54%) were devoted to telling us about John McCain himself: his past accomplishments ('I fought crooked deals in the Pentagon'), his qualifications for the job ('I know how the world works'), his family and childhood ('When I was five years old, a car pulled up in front of our house...'), his time as a POW ('On an October morning, in the Gulf of Tonkin...'), his patriotism ('My country saved me'), and so on.

"Another 8 sentences focused on Sarah Palin. This leaves only 116 sentences (43% of the speech) to discuss the topics that one might otherwise expect to constitute the majority of the speech: the state of the nation, his policy positions, future promises, differences between his positions and Obama's, and so on.

"The contrast with Barack Obama's speech is pretty dramatic if you go back and review the transcript of both speeches. Obama dwells almost exclusively on the realm of the state of the country, the future, what America is all about, key components of the platform, etc -- only occasionally sprinkling in comments about himself and his family that help to provide context and credibility.

"Using a similar analysis of the 226 sentences in the speech, 35 are devoted to Obama himself and/or his family, or about 15% of the speech. More than a third of these came in a single section containing memories about his mother and grandparents ('These are my heroes.')."