Obama & “You” II
March 5, 2009 by Jerry
In my previous post, “Obama & You,” I described how, during his pursuit of the presidency, Barack Obama, in order to involve his potential voters, consciously shifted from speaking about himself to speaking about his audiences, the electorate. Shifting from “I” to “you” or its variation, “your,” he deployed the word extensively on his website, in his campaign materials, and especially, throughout his speeches.
Tracking Obama’s word usage from candidate to president demonstrates a further shift in his focus.
In his historic Inaugural Address, he used “you” only 15 times, but said “us,” 23 times, “we” 62 times, and “our” 70 times. “Us,” “we,” and “our,” are words that involve the “you” of the audience, but are more inclusive.
In his first formal address to a joint session of congress, his focus widened from the electorate to include the assembled members of congress. He was seeking cooperation and commitment from them and from all citizens to work together, to “rebuild and recover.”
His word count: “you” 40 times, “us” 19 times, “our” 115 times, and the lion’s share went to “we” for a grand total of 138 times. Granted, the latter speech was about three times as long as the Inaugural Address but, in his goal to rally a worried nation and a recalcitrant congress, he shifted his pronoun usage. Hendrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker noted that “he spoke of ‘we’—of common responsibility of past and future alike.” Inclusiveness was the order of the day.
As a benchmark of the shift, away from himself, Obama said “I” only 15 times, and “me” only 7 times. The speech was not about him, it was about all of us. The president was rallying us round the flag.
As a footnote, Obama used “I” and “me” throughout the speech quite correctly—probably in response to a New York Times article (published on the day of the speech) by two grammarians who chided his prior usage of those pronouns.
And in a second footnote of delicious irony, the Times copy editors applied their self-proclaimed punctuation style of using an apostrophe “s” to indicate a plural in the title of said article: “The I’s Have It,” thus making the grammarians—whose new book is called Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language—appear ungrammatical.
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