The most flaccidly anticipated event of the Utah Senatorial election happened last Friday, with the one and only debate between incumbent Orrin Hatch and GOP challenger Dan Liljenquist happening on the radio, in the middle of the day, moderated by a guy who still owes us two plane tickets to Denver.
The hour-long debate was reviewed as “heated” and “testy” and other such adjectives journalists seem to adore using. In actuality, it was 60 minutes of Orrin Hatch trying to remember whether he took his pills that morning*.
But now that the debate is done, we have some time to recap what was said. In true blowhard-journalist fashion, what we’ve done is—using a transcript from the debate—analyzed the word frequency**. Here are the most interesting details:
- “Utah” was said 55 times. The legend goes that saying “Utah” 75 times in an hour summon’s Brigham Young’s ghost—so Hatch and Liljenquist narrowly avoided being involuntarily married to 20+ women.
- “Senator” was said 53 times, in case anyone was unsure what this whole debate was about.
- “uh” was said 37 times, making it the tenth most common word (other than words like a, an, the, etc.) uttered during the debate. In other words, these guys are idiots.
- “Coin,” “Texter,” and “Unintelligible” were each said six times, which we can only assume has to do with some sort of sex act.
Anyway, the whole thing was pretty pointless. Whether Hatch wins or Liljenquist wins, we’re going to have an idiot Senator. Maybe we can get Fred Karger to run for Senate; he seems like a pretty good guy.
*Just kidding. We have no idea what happened. We didn’t listen.
**The pundits always seem to do this crap after big speeches. As if word frequency is the best indicator of content.