Obama's "Issue Portfolio" Seems More Diversified than McCain

Saw this interesting graph on Gelman's blog. Since it's clear that McCain simply has fewer words, it'd be nice to have a second table (like recommended in the comments) of the share of total words devoted to anyone of these issues. But, I suspect what that would do is blow up the two large red scores for McCain on homeland security and the war in Iraq, and we'd see that his entire platform is emphasizing this. Given it's a recession year, the Fair model basically guarantees the incumbent party will lose, because nothing matters more than (a) GDP and unemployment and (b) inflation to election and re-election. Since both GDP is probably going to be sluggish all year, if not negative at some point, and unemployment is rising - AND inflation - I don't see how in the world McCain can pull this off. Since his base is so lukewarm, at best, towards him, maybe his strategy has been forced to move more to the right so as to capture those conservatives. Unfortunately, for him, Obama is worshipped by his base, which frees him up to go deep into the center. Obama could even go right of center, without probably losing any of his peeps, even.

But that's a tangent - I was saying, I would like to see a second graph that had issues as a share of total words so that we could account for the fact that McCain simply says fewer things. Like Gelman, I think un-alphabetizing this would be helpful - probably just putting it in order of importance is the way to draw this.

Since I don't have television, I don't notice what is said in the speeches. But I was really taken aback by the amount of time, apparently, that Obama is spending talking about technology. Apparently, that's the largest in absolute value, and certainly the largest as a share of total words too.