The Glade 4.0

http://www.thefoxnation.com/politics/20 ... obs-speech


Number of reference to
taxpayers:2
tax cuts: 2
Small business: 8
I/me/ : 132

Just for funs.

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"Life isn't divided into genres. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."
— Alan Moore

Lol.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Are we thinking that any presidents write their own speeches regularly?

I really don't care who writes his speeches, TheRiov. You are not perplexed by the level of self-reference in his speeches?

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*shrug* its an oratorial choice. Possibly not ideal, but the President is not facing re-election for another 2.5 years. Its possible he's trying to set himself up as a lightning rod.

From what I read of the speech last night, he's doing no such thing, but trying to provide as much distance as possible between himself and the outrage (real or perceived) at our current government.

That would be a valid hypothesis, TheRiov, if you discounted his constant use of the "Bush Shield", the "Republican Shield", the "Big Bankers Shield", the "Wall Street Shield" and the "Washington" shield. The preposterous number of self-references is much more indicative of his nose-in-the-air arrogance.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Caption:

*sniffffff* Ahhh! It still doesn't stink. Go me!

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Holy shitsnacks!

I'm also amused that anyone here is suprised that an elected politician has an ego. More than 50% of the population of one of the larger nations on Earth put down an "I like you" vote on election day. If that many people decided they liked me, I'd probably have an ego too.

I'm saving this pic ...

Caption:

I smell *sniff * middle class people.

TheRiov: The problem is, most of the country doesn't know Barak Obama, anymore than they know any other politician or celebrity. They know a marketable, packaged image, and that's about it.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

Obama received a total of 69,456,897 (52.9%) popular votes.

The population of the US is ~300M. This is about 23% of the population of the US that voted for Obama.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Fine. ok. if 69 million people liked me I'd say I earned the ego. It hardly invalidates the point.

Sure it does. Its ok to have an ego, its not ok to be a supercilious douchebag about it.

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Holy shitsnacks!

I did a word search on the speech in question and came up 108 I/me references and a fair number of those come in the introductions before the body of the speech.

The White House billed the event as a "health care" townhall vs. Fauxnews calling it a "jobs speech" though to me it reads like a campaign speech.

They all read like campaign speeches. That said, his level of self-reference is still troubling. The State of the Union address is similarly voiced.

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Given the egos on this board (myself included) I dont think we should be leveling fingers.

Give a man a speech and he will earn a days applause, teach a man how to use a teleprompter and he will be elected to office.

TheRiov:

I'm not concerned about ego. Everyone human being has an ego. I'm not even concerned about egotism. I'm concerned about the sitting President's inability to lead and his rhetorical choices.

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DFK wants to cross-pollinate threads, but would thereby set a bad example as a mod. Instead, DFK will reference himself in the third person and imply that TheRiov should examine a particular thread about a particular speech on a particular "yesterday" and look at one of the particular posts near the top of the thread.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

I took a quick look at Obama's, G. W. Bush's and (just for fun) Reagan's first State of the Union addresses. These are obviously quick and dirty counts since I do not have time to comb each speech for every possible word variant. These numbers were generated by searching the bodies of the speeches for common words and dividing by the word total.

Obama
we/our 3.6%
I/me 1.2%

Bush
we/our 4.0%
I/me 1.1%

Reagan
we/our 3.7%
I/me 0.7%

Given my cursory readings of these speeches I attribute the slight difference between Obama and Bush to the more informal tone Obama seems to favor (using I/I'm/me/my instead of we/our). On the surface there does not appear to be a difference between the amount of self-reference in Obama and Bush's first SotU speeches. Reagan's speech does appear to be less self-referential than the other two, however, without more comprehensive study I can't say for sure whether these differences are real (statistical) or artifacts or matters of style.

Unless somebody has more concrete proof this thread looks like another case of people's biases showing.

Meh. Bush sucked monkey *** though.

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

Telumehtar:

I'm not fan of George Walker Bush, but this isn't really an issue of bias.

State of the Union Address, 2002
In George Walker Bush's first state of the Union Address, I used as a whole word (including as part of a contraction), 30 times. Two of those are anecdotal quote of someone else. The rest are in reference to either a stated belief about the state of the nation and his will to act in response to 9-11 or they are used in reference to other individuals about compromises on policy making, decision making, and general diplomatic measures. The word "we" is used 55 times. The word "our" is used 65 times. Inclusive first person pronouns exist at a ratio of 4:1.

State of the Union Address, 2010
Conversely, Barack Obama used the first person pronoun "I" as a whole word (including contractions) 105 times. He used the word "my" 11 times. He used the word "our" 110 times. He used the word "we" 174 times. So, I'll giving an inclusive first person pronoun usage of 2.5:1 (284 vs 116).

As I said, I find his self-reference level troubling, especially since George Walker Bush used significantly less pronouns in his speech in general. I also find the reliance on pronouns as a rhetorical vehicle problematic and poor speech writing.

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I don't care if the President could or couldn't pass Dr Khross's speach writing class, it wouldn't make his ideas any more or less palatable to me.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Khross: I get entirely different numbers:

Obama: we 143 / our 91 (234) vs I 69 / me 11 / my 7 (87) or a ratio or 2.7.

Bush: we 80 / our 79 (159) vs I 32 / me 4 / my 13 (49) or a ratio of 3.2.

I didn't assume anyone liked Bush. I was merely using his SotU address as a point of comparison. A number of people on this thread agree that Obama is too self-referential based on a Fauxnews report which misrepresented a town-hall meeting as a speech and miscounted the number of self-references in that "speech". You said the SotU was similarly self-referential and so I looked at a couple of others as a point of reference. As I said earlier the differences I do see between Bush and Obama are stylistic.

Ax me if I care, yo.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine