We have been hearing a lot this week about how Mitt Romney's "religion" speech (6 December 2007) is similar in purpose to John Kennedy's speech on his religion (12 September 1960). I did a bit of comparative quantitative research. I have come to the conclusion that the only thing these two speeches have in common is their having been delivered by politicians from Massachusetts.
Word counts (Romney, Kennedy):
Total words: 2550, 1566
Own religion*: 1, 19
God: 14, 1
faith: 16, 1
religion/-ous: 40, 19
Jesus and/or Christ: 3, 0
Christian: 1, 0
Protestant: 0, 4
Jew: 2, 3
Islam/Muslim**: 4, 0
One might get the impression that these speeches had rather different audiences and purposes.
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* I.e. "Mormon" or "Catholic" and variations like -ism.
** Also "Islamist"; One of Romney's references to Islam contained the words "radical violent" as modifiers, while one of his references to Jews had "killing" right before it (coming immediately after the reference to "radical violent Islam," of course).
(Cross-posted at Fruits & Votes.)
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