From almost the moment President Obama assumed office, observers began calling attention to his unusual proclivity to use the pronoun I. In one of the earliest notices of this practice, an alarmed Terence Jeffrey of CNS News counted 34 I’s in the president’s speech on the federal rescue of General Motors but, ominously, just one mention of “Congress” and none of “law.” Stories documenting Obama’s fondness for the personal pronoun have dotted newspapers and blogs ever since. Just last week, a report in Grabien charged the president with referencing himself (I or we) 118 times in 33 minutes in his departure speech from India, which computed to a rate of “3.5 Obama references per minute.”
It comes as no surprise that most who read the I-meter have been critical of the president. Their calculations are meant to suggest that Obama has crossed a verbal Rubicon, employing the first person more often than any other president. Language, to these critics, clearly matters. Obama’s pronominal binging, they assert, bespeaks a dangerous personalism in his view of governance, a boundless narcissism in his psychological disposition, and a peculiar solipsism that demands that his listeners see the world as filtered through his eyes. Typical of this last rhetorical feature, it was charged, is a passage from the president’s recent State of the Union address: “I’ve seen the hopeful faces of young graduates from New York to California; . . . I’ve mourned with grieving families in Tucson and Newtown; . . . I’ve watched Americans beat back adversity from the Gulf Coast to the Great Plains.” Could these events have taken place, and these sentiments been experienced, if President Obama had not been there?
The president’s defenders have reacted to this series of articles with astonishment, wondering at a preoccupation they see as trivial. The repeated exercise of counting words and devising formulae, dressed in a veneer of objectivity, is evidence of the critics’ mental derangement. Their behavior is fueled by an irrational antipathy to the president, more sophisticated than, though no different from, the rantings of the birthers. Insofar as there is any factual basis to these findings, defenders argue, it proves nothing more than the presence of a personal linguistic trait or marker, which almost everyone possesses. If ever Obama gets the chance to answer this charge, he can be expected to dismiss it with the simple claim, I am who I am.
Some supporters have gone further, however, and questioned whether the whole case is not overblown. Other leaders, they argue, have also availed themselves regularly of personal pronouns. It is not necessary to go in search of ancient imperial declarations, like Louis XIV’s boast “L’état c’est moi,” to make this point; it is sufficient to compare Obama with past presidents. A quick survey by BuzzFeed in 2014 purported to show that in press conferences Obama has been more sparing in his use of personal pronouns (I, me, my, mine, and myself) than most of his predecessors. According to BuzzFeed, “Obama is maybe the least narcissistic president since 1945.” This means less than Truman, Eisenhower, or George H. W. Bush.
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Is there a way of resolving the controversy? Fortunately, the modern research university, fortified by an influx of federal funding for the digital humanities and the analysis of Big Data, offers the resources for grappling with this question. To be sure, contemporary social science, which is pledged to value-free analysis, must scrupulously abstain from assessing competing normative claims regarding the dangers of self-reference. But it can settle the factual question of the frequency with which such references occur, avoiding both the Scylla of journalistic impressionism and the Charybdis of partisan statistical analysis.
A team of researchers at the University of Virginia’s prestigious Laputa Institute of Computational Linguistics undertook a detailed analysis of the use of “I” in spoken State of the Union addresses delivered before Congress. The list of such speeches is long but not comprehensive. The Constitution specifies only that the president “shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union,” and after Washington and Adams appeared in person before Congress to deliver their addresses, Jefferson turned to the practice of issuing reports in written form. Jefferson’s precedent was followed all the way up to Wilson, who returned in person to the Capitol. Even then, not every president followed suit. President Coolidge delivered his speech in 1923 but, perhaps mindful of his epithet, elected thereafter to keep silent. Hoover also skipped. FDR restored the ritual of appearing before Congress, which for the most part has since been observed. With some minor technical adjustments—counting an incoming president’s first speech to Congress as a State of the Union address, and excluding the rare lame-duck address of an outgoing president—the institute team was able to construct a data set consisting of 97 speeches, a respectable N by modern social scientific standards.
The results of the study will almost certainly disappoint President Obama’s critics. Researchers were able to determine the average number of I’s per speech (41.2), the average for each president, and a serial ranking of the speeches and the presidents. Careful analysis of these measures disconfirms the contention that President Obama is the most I-prone occupant of the Oval Office. That distinction goes not to Barack Obama, but to Bill Clinton, with an impressive average of 102.1 I’s per State of the Union address. Clinton also established himself as the master of self-reference by giving the two most I-laden speeches.
The charges leveled against President Obama are not, however, entirely lacking in evidentiary basis. The president places in a strong second position, with an average of 72.9 I’s, and he can boast of delivering the speech with the third-highest I total (tied with Clinton) in 2010. In that address, Obama unleashed a festival of I’s: “Now, I’m not naïve. I never thought that the mere fact of my election would usher in peace and harmony and some postpartisan era. . . . So no, I will not give up on trying to change the tone of our politics.” Obama’s State of the Union last month ranks a respectable thirteenth in American history. It is, of course, premature to establish Obama’s final status, as he has one more address to deliver. To “catch” President Clinton—if one can allow the metaphor of a competition between the two men—Obama would have to fill his speech with no fewer than 302 I’s, an unprecedented, though not inconceivable, feat.
The ranking of presidents contains some mild surprises. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who in his first Inaugural Address uttered perhaps the nation’s most haunting of all I statements (“But in the event that the Congress shall fail to take one of these two courses, and in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me”), was overall remarkably reserved in his use of I’s, ranking sixteenth and lower than all of his fellow Democrats. President Nixon, though known for his realism, could give way to flights of visionary personal expression, as if he, too, could have a dream: “As I look down that new road which I have tried to map out today, I see a new America as we celebrate our 200th anniversary six years from now. I see an America in which we have abolished hunger, provided the means for every family in the Nation to obtain a minimum income, made enormous progress in providing better housing, faster transportation, improved health, and superior education.”
There is one element from the ranking of presidents that virtually demands comment. It is the stark contrast between the top and bottom pairs. The most highly ranked presidents, the Democrats Clinton and Obama, stand out for being more than a full standard deviation above the mean, while the two lowest, the Federalists Washington and John Adams, are more than a standard deviation below it. These two pairs are located, so to speak, at the antipodes of self-preoccupation. Clinton and Obama together manage to hold 7 of the top 10 places for individual speeches, while Washington and Adams delivered 8 of the 10 bottom-ranking speeches. These differences could have something to do with context. Washington and Adams appeared before small audiences of persons whom they mostly knew—though this is no clear reason not to employ the intimate or familiar first person—while Clinton and Obama held center stage before a much larger body, complete with galleries packed with human props, and spoke to the entire American public.
Even with these factors taken into account, however, it is hard not to consider assigning some of the explanatory power to the different character traits of the men involved. Though known for his personal vanity, John Adams often used the first person to stress a sense of duty, while Clinton’s I’s wander more freely, hinting at a want of restraint. It is also worth considering whether Washington’s I’s lean toward the self-effacing, while Obama’s suggest self-absorption. To confirm this hypothesis, just try to imagine George Washington posing for a “selfie.”
James W. Ceaser is professor of politics at the University of Virginia and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
