Republicans debate war using words and clouds

Since I missed all of last night’s Republican Debate, as well as all of the previous debates I said to myself, “why not let a professional tell me what happened?” I didn’t use to be this way, but it’s no fun watching debates by myself since I mostly hang out with Canadians and most of them don’t want to watch American politics.

So I read a live-slog through last night’s performances with the Stranger Election Control Board doing the deed. At the 8:02 part of the debate, they said this:

Every other word Fiorina says is “Hillary” or “Clinton.” Someone should do a word cloud of words Carly Fiorina has said, just to see how big the letters “HILLARY CLINTON” can be.

I like word clouds a lot, and so decided in my spare time, while eating KitKats and wearing clothes and not pajamas (well, I could be and you wouldn’t know), to see if I could make this happen.

I grabbed the transcript from TIME of last night’s debate and just let my fingers do the cutting and pasting. TL;DR I end up reading the whole debate which is exactly what I didn’t want to do since I was putting all my trust into the wise hands of professionals.

Anyway, I used a handy little word cloud maker and wa-la, word clouds from people who want to be our leaders.

Republicans debate as seen from my word cloud

Carly Fiorina

I figured I’d go with Carly Fiorina in the number 1 word cloud position, since this is how the whole thing got started.

word cloud of fiorina — Carly Fiorina in her own words last night at the debate.

I pretty much cut and pasted everything including from the transcript that quoted her. I also included the name marker of ‘FIORINA:’ so that it would be easy to quickly ID my word clouds by the other politicians. Carly Fiorina did not ever use her own name so the word cloud could not stand on its own in a court of law.