Topic: Presidential Campaign 2008
Ron Paul Doesn't Look Presidential on Leno Presidential Races in an American Idol Worldby John Armstrong
(Libertarian)
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
After Ron Paul's appearance on Jay Leno's tonight show on the eve of the New Hampshire Primary, I thought about what a lot of people who only get their news from the mainstream media might think about Ron Paul. My guess is that their thoughts would be something along the lines of "Ron Paul doesn't look Presidential."
This prompted my performing an interesting, to me anyway, series of Google searches. I wanted to share the results with you as I think they offer a revealing, albeit very non-scientific, perspective of this Presidential Election.
I Googled the following (all with quotes):
.
Doesn't look Presidential: 2,380 matches
Doesn't sound Presidential: 273
.
Romney looks Presidential: 612
Huckabee looks Presidential: 4
Paul looks Presidential: 3
.
Romney sounds Presidential: 34
Huckabee sounds Presidential: 2
Paul sounds Presidential: 1 (and it was about Saturday's ABC Debate)
.
Mitt Romney is funny: 1
Mike Huckabee is funny: 3830
Ron Paul is funny: 7480
.
Mitt Romney is funny -kook -nuts -crazy: 1
Mike Huckabee is funny -kook -nuts -crazy: 2860
Ron Paul is funny -kook -nuts -crazy: 6
.
Romney is intelligent: 1480
Huckabee is intelligent: 8
Paul is intelligent: 4790
.
Mitt Romney is intelligent: 7
Mike Huckabee is intelligent: 2
Ron Paul is intelligent: 1790
I could easily go into a dissertation about how looking Presidential seems to be more important than sounding Presidential. I could ask you to consider whether sounding Presidential had anything to do with the actual words being conveyed or simply how they were conveyed. I could write about how seeming funny is more important than looking presidential or sounding presidential. I could write about how all of those things seem to be more important than being intelligent, and how sad this is. I could write about how the media portrays Ron Paul in order to dismiss his intelligence. I could write about the dumbing down of America. I could write about a lot of things, but I won't.
If you can't interpret this for yourself and understand the implications, you likely wouldn't be reading this to begin with and probably feel an odd sense of connection with the 90% of people who voted in Iowa last week. New Hampshire, please show us today that you can read and think and that those things are important to you.
We all know that the smart kid in class gets laughed at and called names only later to be called "Boss" when enough time has passed. My only hope is that there is enough time left before November for the smart kid in this class of candidates to be called "President."
Your Fellow American,
John Armstrong
P.S. If you want a glimpse of his intelligence, understand what his talk about the Federal Reserve or Gold Standard is about, and haven't read the article I wrote titled "Ron Paul: A Man Among Boys at ABC Debate", this would be a great time to do it.
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Excellent points, John. In all of the writings about Ron Paul available online, this is one way I've never seen to showcase his intelligence and qualifications (of which many of us are already well aware and yet so many more still need to learn about). Bravo!
Posted By: John Armstrong
Date: 2008-01-08 01:15:17
Just a silly exercise, badmedia. But if you put the words in quotes as I did, it returns exact matches for each phrase; not just word count. Thanks for doing your own search. I hope that a lot of other people will as well. As a small l libertarian, I encourage individuals to do their own stuff and their right to have their own opinions--and you did both. Thank you.
Yes, the searches I did were also in quotes. I've created interfaces that work with google API to provide google search results on other websites via XML etc, so I'm familiar with the workings more than most, since I've gotten documention from google on it.
But it is still a word count. Or in this case, a phrase count. It doesn't take time frames into account, changes in frequencies etc. Oddly enough, I heard something recently about some group that talked about web trends, and this point about word count and trends being different was something they mentioned, otherwise I probably wouldn't have even noticed.
Wish I could remember more of the factors they mentioned. If I had known I'd been talking about it today, I'd made a note of it. Oh well.
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