The “I” President
In a class at Faulkner University in the early 90s entitled “Personal Growth and Development,” our instructor challenged us to go a week without beginning a sentence with “I.” Her point was to encourage us not to think about ourselves, but to think about others. As you might expect, it was a challenge. Yet, I still try not to begin a sentence with “I,” at least in my more pensive moments (which is why I began the previous sentence with an adverb!).
Conservatives frequently point out how often President Obama uses the word “I” or “me” or otherwise refers to himself. Up until recently, the evidence was anecdotal that President Obama was more narcissistic than any president we’ve had.
But recently, some objective evidence has been brought to light that concerns that subject. At the University of Virginia (founded, you might remember, by President Thomas Jefferson), students in the Laputa Institute of Computational Linguistics have studied our presidents’ State of the Union addresses.
The study is reported in the February 16, 2015 issue of The Weekly Standard by a professor of politics at U of V, James Ceaser (pages 10-12). Presidents Washington and Adams gave their State of the Union addresses in person. From Jefferson to Taft, the speech was sent to Congress in a written form. Wilson returned to the personal speech and that has been the general pattern ever since.
So, the Institute of Computational Linguistics had 97 oral speeches from which to compile their statistics. Are you ready for the most “I” centered president? Well, it’s not Barak Obama. But, it will hardly surprise anyone that it is actually President Bill Clinton. While all the presidents averaged 41.2 references to themselves in their State of the Union speeches, President Clinton averaged 102.1 such references. Clinton, according to the research, also had the two most “I”-saturated speeches.
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But, the criticism of President Obama may not be baseless. He does take second place, with 72.9 “I” references per speech, on average. Also, after Clinton’s two “I”-immersed speeches, Obama has the third highest “I”-dominated single speech. Of course, President Obama still has one more State of the Union speech to give so he might outstrip Clinton for the highest rank. That would be improbable but not impossible.
Professor Ceaser makes another interesting observation. Presidents Clinton and Obama are more than one full standard deviation above the mean while the two lowest ranked presidents, Washington (13.4) and Adams (10.5), are a full standard deviation below the mean. If you remember anything about the character of Washington and Adams, this would come as no surprise. These two men gave eight out of the ten lowest “I”-dominated speeches out of the total 97. They were statesmen rather than politicians. Caesar writes: “It is also worth considering whether Washington’s “I”’s lean toward the self-effacing, while Obama’s suggest self-absorption” (12).
With all of that as illustration, let’s return to my professor’s “I” challenge. Can you go a week without beginning a sentence with the word “I”? Even more importantly, and the purpose of this whole exercise, can you and I go a week (or a day) without thinking of ourselves first?
That is the fundamental challenge for humanity (Romans 12:3).
— Paul Holland
