Presidential debate, recurring phrases

Cameron Marlow has posted an instant noun-phrase analysis of last night’s debate. Interesting stuff.

Looking only at noun phrases of at least 2 words occuring at least twice for a given speaker, we arrive at some spectacular catch phrases. For Bush my favorite is “hard work,” which he said repeatedly. Apparently Bush thinks that the world is a difficult place to be. For Kerry, a salient phrase was “war as a last resort.”

The top 25 phrases for Bush and Kerry follow. The number following each phrase is a rank described by the length of the phrase and the number of times it appeared.