Maybe it’s just me (I doubt it), but as concerned as I might be about the outcome of the 2008 Presidential election, I don’t think I have the mental, emotional or intestinal fortitude to sit through hours upon hours of televised speeches and media coverage to keep on top of what the candidates are saying. I would love to see a ‘CliffsNotes‘ version of all the speeches.

Soon after President George W. Bush’s final State of the Union speech, our VP of Client Services, Shannon Delaney, shared a link to a tag cloud that was based upon the transcript:

At a glance, you would conceivably be able to see what the gist of the speech was. If you believe that the most important issue in any given speech gets the most play, you would expect to see words associated with that issue stand out in the tag cloud.

After seeing this tag cloud, I wondered whether a tag cloud could help track each candidate’s position statements on a variety of issues across multiple speeches over the course of the campaign.

Better yet, wouldn’t it be impossibly too simple and cool if we could slap all the transcripts of all the speeches made by one candidate, run it through a tag cloud utility and … PRESTO … see what each candidate is consistently saying at a glance.

I realize that a tag cloud doesn’t do everything for you in preparation for an election, but I would hope, even in this wondrous age of information and technology, to take a candidate at their word.