The words of a politician during a campaign can tell us a great deal about that person, including the leadership style we might expect him or her to utilize once in office. However, too often voters make their decisions and cast their ballots without regard for the type of leadership that will be provided in the future. Analysis of existing literature indicates no content analysis based research with respect to the leadership language in a political candidate's campaign speeches.

The purpose of this content analysis was to determine the leadership language communicated by Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Hussein Obama from the time they declared candidacy until Barack Obama was declared the presumptive candidate. The leadership language themes identified were limited to the Full Range Model and included transformational leadership, transactional leadership, and passive leadership. Additional themes identified were economy issues, health care issues, and foreign policy issues.

Analyses were conducted using frequencies, Analysis of Covariance, and Pearson correlation. The results indicated Hillary Clinton used more transformational language than Barack Obama. However, Barack Obama used more passive language than Hillary Clinton. In addition, for transactional language, the results showed significant main effects for audience and speech topic. The results for passive language showed significant main effects for candidate and speech topic. For economic issues, the results showed significant main effect for audience. For health care issues language, the results showed a significant interaction between candidate and audience. For Hillary Clinton, transformational leadership language was positively correlated with campaign month, while transactional language was negatively correlated with campaign month. Overall, the difference in mean frequency percentages of foreign policy issues language by campaign month was significant.