Opinion: Government: Judging lawmakers by their vocabularies
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Who cares more about the middle class, Republicans or Democrats? If concern is measured by tongue-flapping in the House and Senate, then the answer is Democrats -- and it’s not close. On the other hand, by the same metric, only Republicans seem to care about job creators.
Those two nuggets of information, whatever they may be worth, are provided by a new site called Capitol Words that’s at least as entertaining as it is informative. Created by the nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation, the site digs through the online version of the Congressional Record to measure, instantly, how many times members of Congress have uttered the word or phrase of your choosing since January 1996.
The results are displayed as a graph, with breakdowns available to show the party, individual members and state delegations that made the heaviest use of the word or phrase in question. Elsewhere, the site displays the top words and phrases by month and by day. You can also check each lawmaker’s go-to utterances for each two-year session of Congress, and see which other members share their favorite words.
For example, the favorite word of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) so far this Congress is ‘ethanol,’ reflecting her effort to roll back federal subsidies for the corn-powered fuel. Her closest colleagues have been Sens. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and John Kyl (R-Ariz.). Given that Schumer and Kyl are ideological opposites, I’m thinking that this feature on the site isn’t terribly revealing.
Most interesting to me was the site’s ability to show how the use of a phrase has ebbed and flowed over time. The phrase ‘job creators’ was almost never heard in the Capitol before the Obama administration, and it has escalated exponentially this year. But then, the same is true for the phrase ‘millionaires and billionaires.’
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