Minnesota’s Ed Morrissey offers a response to Barack Obama’s just-finished speech to school children, in part running the speech through a word-frequency counter. His findings: “Barack Obama referenced himself more than school, education, responsibility, country/nation, parents, and teachers combined. And to think that people accused Obama of self-promotion!”
But as John Cole writes, Ronald Reagan’s speech to students had plenty of uses of the first person: 25 “I”-words compared to Obama’s 56. More telling though is how many times the two presidents used terms like “responsibility” (Obama 8, Reagan 0), “country”/”nation” (10 to 4), “parents”/”teachers” (5 to 0).
Morrissey’s premise is silly, of course, but using his logic, Obama beats Reagan in terms of those tenets conservatives suggest they’ve got a corner on — patriotism, personal responsibility and family.













2 Comments »
Comment posted September 8, 2009 @ 12:03 pm
Very related:
http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2009/09/reagans_speech_to_school_kids.php
Comment posted September 8, 2009 @ 12:06 pm
Thanks Aaron. That’s Ed Brayton, who writes for our sister site in Michigan. For those who haven’t followed the link, he dug up Reagan’s speech, finding: “Unlike the bland pep talk Obama is giving, Reagan actually did exactly what the fantasists of the lunatic right have been claiming Obama was going to do, pushing specific policies and lauding how great his administration had been for the country.”
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