"A culture is made -- or destroyed -- by its articulate voices"
Friday, December 18, 2009 at 9:29PM The idea came to me for this post tonight when I watched the Nobel Peace Prize Lecture given by President Obama. What inspired me about his speech were three key things:
- He used tremendous humility in his words and body language. Obama uses humility first to disarm his critics, those who say he doesn't deserve the prize so early in his mandate. He tackles the issues right at the start and uses humility, one of the least used but most effective tools in gaining the will of people to follow you.
- He demonstrates the ability to see all sides of an issue, and recognizes their merits. Obama takes an inordinate amount of time, especially considering the audience, explaining why sometime War is morally just. Unlike most politicians, and rigid partisans, he avoids the trap of always needing to talk in one set of code, and more importantly is brave enough to say what sometimes people don't want to hear.
- He inspires us to think in greater terms, above political, geographic, religious, or racial boundaries. His masterful use of the English language, the above mentioned humility and straight-talk, and an ability to draw a picture of what something better might look like, these all help us see a picture of something better. Politics AND leadership is of course about selling hope.
So what?
I am tired of vitriolic partisanship, as most of us are. But when you walk down the dark alley of blog comments, newspaper letters to the editor, and online debate, we are confronted often with what can only be described as people needing to argue their position, twisting the facts or getting stuck in the rut of cognitive dissonance, never willing to concede that we all mostly agree on a large percentage of what each political party stands for.
So, in my personal opinion, the ability for a party leader to connect with us as a humble, straight-talking, and visionary person is the single greatest reason why we may vote for their party. Most Albertans are not the political enthusiasts we are (assuming you have read this far), and so populism in how we choose leaders remains a major factor. Ralph Klein held onto the hearts of Albertans for a long time, and mostly because we felt that he was a humble everyman. When he did something beyond reproach, we started to lose faith in him as a person, and that we couldn't trust him.
This is important because we are seeing a collection of movements start to form in Alberta politically. The Wildrose Alliance have become the standard as far as the polls are concerned, yet another movement, the Progressives are gathering. If you asked them they would say that what the Wildrose stand for is not what the moderate Albertan stands for. The new party movement, Renew Alberta, are advertising themselves as centrists, and again would say that they differ greatly from the Wildrose and the left-leaning Liberals and NDP.
I am going to argue that many of these party policies and principals are identical, when you look at them in simple text form. Below are Wordles taken from the policy documents and websites. I am willing to bet that you would find it very difficult to guess all five party Wordles correctly. In fact I'll buy the iTunes album of your choice for the first person who guesses all five correctly in the comments.
So my point is this. I think most Albertans want to be excited, inspired, filled with hope, and have a level of trust in our next Premier. I think they will want someone who uses humility, straight-talk, a willingness to see all sides and the vision to lead us along a path of continuous improvement. I don't see that leader yet.
PARTY #1
PARTY #2
PARTY #3
PARTY #4
PARTY #5
p.s. In building these I went to the website of each party and copied and pasted their policy documents, "what we stand for" website text, and in some cased had to past segments together. I REMOVED the following words as much as possible. (PARTY NAMES, Alberta, Albertans, variations on names like Conservative, or Conservatism). This is fun for a poli-geek like me, and I know this isn't science, so please don't give me any BS in the comments about methodology.
Thanks to Wordle for helping with the clouds. If you want to see the one I did of President Obama's speech, you can view it here.
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Reader Comments (12)
1 lib
2 renew ab
3 ndp
4 wra
5 pc
not even close?
t
Tom:
You have at least one correct, maybe more, maybe not. But you certainly don't have it right. Thanks for trying though!
C
I'm going to say Party 1 is the Alberta Liberals, Party 2 is Renew Alberta, Party 3 is the NDPs, Party 4 is the PCs, and Party 5 is the Wildrose Alliance.
:P
You can just tell me how many I got wrong. ;-)
1. NDP
2. Renew
3. Liberals
4. Reboot Ab
5. Wild Rose Alliance
Andre - you missed the conservatives in there. ;-)
1) Liberal
2) PC (this cloud has the most spin and least substance)
3) NDP
4) Renew (most sophisticated, short on specifics)
5) WRA (looks like from rank and file written material)
Obama is the worst type of poltician. He speaks very well, yes. He's a great communicator. But he doens't tell you anything (or very little) of what he stands for - and stands to go down as one of the worst Presidents in American history. Bring back George W. Bush.
And Chris, remove the term "capitalist" as your descriptor - Obama is anything but that.
Roger that Milt... I'll get right on it.
I guess this was not as good ideas as I thought. On only the second guess, Philip correctly identified the party policies. Maybe it's only me who see a whole bunch of the same.
The parties above are:
Party 1 - Alberta Liberals
Party 2 - Renew Alberta
Party 3 - NDP
Party 4 - PC
Party 5 - Wildrose Alliance
Phil, pick an album out of the iTunes library and I am happy to email it to you. DM on Twitter with your pick and email address.
Just another left wing post from this blog.
I got it? Yay! XD
It wasn't actually as easy as made out by the fact that I got it on post two. Just to briefly explain my logic:
Party 2 and 4 (Renew and WRA) were the most sparsely filled Wordles, so I pegged them as the two youngest parties in the province. It was just a question of deciding between the two. The first thought for me was the giant Believe in Party 2. That to me stood out as being a 'left' word (see Obama), and combined with the other words like Public, Debate, and Responsibility made me think of a party that was just trying to bring discussion without any true direction. They also failed to mention actual policy decisions, like health care, or taxes. (However, it is fair to note that the PCs also use Believe fairly prominently, but this is overshadowed by their use of Principles).
I also used the density guess to label Party 1 and 4 as the two long-standing major parties, the Liberals and PCs. It was actually far more tricky to decide between these two, as they are very similar, as you pointed out in the main post! The trick here was that I noticed Party 1 mentioned Aboriginal, as a fairly primary word. A quick search between the Liberal and PC website revealed that it was the Liberals mentioning Aboriginal policy. It is also easy (in hindsight) to look and say that the words like Principles and Family strike as more right wing.
Party 3 was the odd one out for me, and was put down as NDP simply because they were the only ones left! Like the new parties, they failed to really state a lot in their direction, with the exception of being all over Energy. They were also the only party with Donations being a primary factor in their statements. In hindsight, one can say that they may be a long-running party, but they lack the vision to carry anything forward, and as a result are struggling to survive and need the donations to keep running. This can be compared with the WRA and Renew, who as young parties are full of energy, and at the moment - not in as dire need for donations, as all eyes are on them.
Hopefully that gives some idea of my thoughts. ^^ They are very very similar, but there are a few clues that I used to try and break them down.
I had settled on 1 - Renew, 2 - Liberals, 3 - NDP, 4 - PC and 5 - WAP, but my logic was a little different than Philips. My technique exposes some interesting tidbits, so I want to point it out.
Noticing that the large words were generally vague or similar to one another I decided to focus on the small words, which obviously were used enough to appear in the wordle but not so much to be platitudes. Anyway I encourage to go back and take a look focussing only on the small words.