With only 20 days to go until the preliminary election, the three men hoping to topple Boston’s longest-serving mayor finally got a chance to land some blows against him in a televised debate Wednesday night moderated by WBZ political analyst (and noted mustache enthusiast) Jon Keller.

A political juggernaut, Mayor Thomas Menino has been at the helm of the Hub since 1993, swatting away opponents to win four terms in office and garnering enough political capital to sidestep the debate process for 16 years. But with a sour economy lingering and voters across the globe tossing out tenured politicians, Menino was forced to strap on his pads and step into the lion’s den at WBZ’s studio in Allston to defend his record.

Flanked by at-large city councilor Sam Yoon to his left and developer Kevin McCrea and councilor Michael Flaherty to his right, Menino spent the hour deflecting barbs from his opponents on education, crime and the concentration of power in the mayor’s office.

And for the most part, the four men on stage played out the roles that had been written for them by political pundits in the lead-up to the debate — a fact that’s kind of borne out by these nifty word clouds that we put together this morning. If you’re not familiar with the concept, word clouds are a stylized way to count up how frequently different words show up in a chunk of text. In this case, we divided up a transcript of the debate by who said what and fed it into a word-clouderator to produce the images below.

*Note: This is not scientific or analytical in any way — it’s a fun exercise in pop psychology at best. Please don’t try to make political decisions based on word art. Not that you would, just sayin’.

One more thing…we really do have a transcript of the entire debate. You can read it here.