Now they’re planning the crime of the century
Well what will it be?
Read all about their schemes and adventuring
Its well worth a fee
— "Crime of the Century", Supertramp (1974)
What continues to amaze me is the not-so-benign neglect being accorded by politicians to the current financial crisis in the U.S. Granted, it’s usually better being ignored by such people; and granted, the current debacle is more complicated than saying "Ken Lay is a bad man". But if you had watched the just-completed Democratic and Republican National Conventions, you wouldn’t have known the U.S. is stumbling through the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Nor would you have known, of course, that we’re queuing up for a bill that could exceed total Iraq War expenditures.
To prove the point to my own satisfaction, I combined the Palin/McCain acceptance speeches in one block of text, and the Obama/Biden speeches in another. I then set up some keywords to compare across the text blocks. The following summary table shows keywords in the left column, and then respective keywords counts for each party’ slate in the appropriate DNC or RNC column. This isn’t the usual exercise in cute tag clouds, but an attempt to understand whether important language concerning the current financial crisis penetrated the political radar over the last few weeks.
And it hasn’t — unless, of course, the repeated utterance of the word "God" came in a context more like "Oh God, we’re screwed!" than I think it did.