An interesting post over at New Scientist’s Short Sharp Science blog reveals something interesting:
Rasa Karapandza and Milos Bozovic of Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain, first analysed the 10-K reports produced by 100 companies between 1993 and 2003.
They found that the reports that focused more on the future – using the terms "will", "shall" and "going to" – tended to do worse, performance-wise, over the coming year. Perhaps it isn’t all that surprising, since companies faring badly may tend to focus more on the future to direct attention away from current woes.
But, more strikingly, the pair did the same thing for presidential debates from 1960 to 2000 and found a very similar pattern. Again, the candidate who focused most on the future did worse on polling day. It wouldn’t be so surprising if the incumbent candidate always won, because they might tend to talk less about the future than about their recent record. But the pattern held true for both incumbents and newcomers.
Something in me says this is related to the phenomenon of successful politicians making only few and fuzzy campaign promises, lest they be held accountable for them later. Yet . . . this is supposed to hold true before a candidate is elected president, and regardless of whether he’s running for a second term. So maybe the connection is somewhat indirect: Perhaps successful candidates learn early on in their careers not to talk too much about the future and it’s part of the overall package of being a good politician–the overall package being what helps them win presidential elections, not just the don’t-talk-about-tomorrow part.
I don’t know if the results of the above study are dependable–or how dependable they are–but if the pattern holds in the current election cycle, then this piece of information is interesting:
A transcript of a Republican debate held on 30 January showed that "will", "shall" or "going to" were used 26 times by McCain, 27 times by Huckabee and 32 times by Romney, suggesting that McCain should ultimately win the candidacy.
And, a transcript of a democratic debate held the following day reveals that "will", "shall" or "going to" were used 70 times by Clinton and 71 times Obama, meaning Clinton should eventually win by a nose.
I don’t know about the relative levels of futurism among the candidates in each party, but not the discrepancy between the two parties.
Time will tell.