shelbinator.com

I know, totally unnecessary title; at least I threw “home” in there.

I meant to put this up a couple days ago, but that whole breaking in the chickensuit thing got in the way. I watched CNN’s special re-presentation of last week’s debates on Sunday, during which Wolf Blitzer constantly patted his network on the back for being so “innovative” about doing what has been all over YouTube and the internet for quite some time: breaking up the debate footage by issue to put various candidates’ footage side by side. They did this for both parties, although they broke up any train of thought the viewer might have by splitting the Republican and Democratic responses with a commercial break every single time, so it really wasn’t all that interesting. However, since I watched it, and since I had my stopwatch in hand the whole time, I figured I’d see what the data played out, considering how uneven in attention the first debate had been.

Life is still pretty good for the “leading contenders,” although Obama is punished a bit for running away with the timeclock on original airing and Richardson somehow manages to stammer his way into a decisive fourth place. Joe Biden and Dennis Kucinich were barely heard from, and Gravel got the potted plant treatment per usual (not going to argue with that).

Taking a look at turns to speak and the relative proportion of time represented, we see that CNN gave Hillary the most responses, even though she was clearly less long-winded than, say, Edwards or Richardson (the Governor had a hard time getting to a direct answer a couple times and needed some prodding from Wolf). The total speaking time from the candidates in the recap was about 32 minutes out of 84 in the debate itself, so the green line denotes the average percentage re-presented of 38%. Relative to that, Richardson got an early Christmas present of 53%, and Kucinich got shafted with about half of the average. Clinton and Edwards, who already got plenty of time on June 3rd, got more than the average share of time, while Obama got less of a reprise than Biden.

I wish I had a decisive conclusion to share, but I’ve got to get back to this terribly exciting 3D shear stress plane maximization problem that’s standing between me and graduation. It, too, lacks a conclusion.