Mitt Romney’s new publication, “Strategy for a Stronger America“, strongly evokes the same themes that Harry Truman outlined during his 1949 Inaugural Speech. The commonalities are there for the taking–several years after a catastrophic event, we face a changing world economy, ideological threats abroad, and emergence of new alliances. If we want to know what a Romney presidency would be like, we perhaps should look at what the Truman presidency was like.

I have been surprised at the lack of buzz around Romney’s release, given that he’s the first Republican candidate to make his positions as explicit as this. Of course at 68 pages it’s not a 5-minute read. I would suspect we’ll hear more from both supporters and detractors over the next 2-3 weeks.

The publication itself is, I must say, top notch. The design is highly appealing, the text is concise and highly quotable, and the pictures are effective at framing Romney as presidential. Whether you’re a ranter or raver, there’s plenty in here to nibble on.

Contained within “Strategy for a Stronger America” is the text to Romney’s piece in July/August 2007 Foreign Affairs, “Rising to a New Generation of Global Challenges“. In order to objectively analyze the rhetoric of this piece, I turned to the technology that we use to run Wonkosphere’s engine, Crawdad’s Centering Resonance Analysis, or CRA. CRA uses natural language processing to construct a concept map, or word network, out of the text. The following shows the CRA Network for Romney’s piece.

Only the most important, or influential words are shown. The words with highest influence are boxed in red; the second most influential in yellow; and the third most influential are unboxed. Connections between words indicate purposeful semantic connections by the writer (Romney).

We see that Romney’s worldview begins with the relationship between the U.S. military and the state of the world. He does not shy away from highlighting the troops in Iraq, and calls for “investments” to deal with our challenges. “Security” and “policy” (Romney’s a PolicyWonk!) are prominent themes, and its interesting to see “economic” so strongly link the themes of “military” and “political”.

The Crawdad software also allows you to compare one text against a whole set of others in order to see which one is closest, or most resonant with the target. I chose as a comparison set the Inaugural Speeches of all the U.S. presidents, as such speeches are both readily available and usually outline the worldview that the incoming president has.

Lo and behold, the software indicates that Romney’s piece is most similar to the inaugural speech by Harry Truman in 1949–by a lot! Here are word pairs that both pieces had in common.

Note the common themes: “Europe”; the connection between “freedom”, “peace”, and “security”; which in turn is connected to “economic development”, through the “world”.

Like Truman, we might expect that a Romney presidency will create new alliances, moving away from the U.N. and towards NATO and other ad hoc alliances; we may see economic outreach to new allies, in the same way the U.S. aided Turkey and Greece after WW2; we may see contraversy over civil rights, via the threat of terrorism replacing the threat of communism; we may see a new nuclear era; and we may see renewal of a cold war (Russia; China; Greenland?).

Finally, like Truman, Romney hopes to show-up all of the pundits when it comes to election predictions.