Keeping Our Eyes On the Ball

TW: I respect George Will and to a lesser degree Mike Gerson but their bullshit columns about alleged Obama narcissism are waste of their talents. We have big issues as a nation without a doubt but we need to keep our collective eyes on the ball. These irrelevant process stories miss the substance of our challenges.

More examples let's talk AfPak. Obama met congressional leaders regarding AfPak. What was the story? Whether or not McCain and Obama had a snippy exchange. Who cares! Our Afghanistan commander McChrystal creates a report. What was the story? The "leakage" of the report, not the substance of the report. Is Obama moving fast enough? Too fast? Is he timid? Is McChrystal violating chain of command? Who cares! What we should care about is the substance of the momentous decisions our POTUS will be making over the coming weeks regarding that highly strategic matter.

From Ezra Klein
"...George Will accuses the Obamas of taking an "Olympic Ego Trip." He does this largely by a word count: "In the 41 sentences of her remarks," Will writes, "Michelle Obama used some form of the personal pronouns 'I' or 'me' 44 times. Her husband was, comparatively, a shrinking violet, using those pronouns only 26 times in 48 sentences." This echoed Michael Gerson's blog post from late September, in which he characterized Obama's speech before the United Nations as "Me. Me, at all costs; me, in spite of all terrors; me, however long and hard the road may be." Gerson said he could not recall another "major American speech in which the narcissism of a leader has been quite so pronounced."

Harsh words. But are they accurate? Language Logs' Mark Liberman had taken a look at this question once before. He republished his results today.

'I took the transcript of Obama's first press conference (from 2/9/2009), and found that he used 'I' 163 times in 7,775 total words, for a rate of 2.10%. He also used 'me' 8 times and 'my' 35 times, for a total first-person singular pronoun count of 206 in 7,775 words, or a rate of 2.65%.

For comparison, I took George W. Bush's first two solo press conferences as president (from 2/22/2001 and 3/29/2001), and found that W used 'I' 239 times in 6,681 total words, for a rate of 3.58% — a rate 72% higher than Obama's rate. President Bush also used 'me' 26 times, 'my' 31 times, and 'myself' 4 times, for a total first-person singular pronoun count of 300 in 6,681 words, or a rate of 4.49% (59% higher than Obama).

For a third data point, I took William J. Clinton's first two solo press conferences as president (from 1/29/1993 and 3/23/1993), and found that he used 'I' 218 times, 'me' 34 times, 'my' 22 times, and 'myself' once, in 6,935 total words. That's a total of 275 first-person singular pronouns, and a rate of 3.14% for 'I' (51% higher than Obama), and 3.87% for first-person singular pronouns overall (50% higher than Obama).'

But maybe something has changed. Maybe Obama is getting worse. Lieberman checked that, too.

As a result of this previous experience, I had a first-person-counting script all ready to go, and it took only a few seconds to check the new transcripts. This time around, Barack Obama's Olympic remarks included 26 first-person-singular words out of 1130, for a rate of 2.3%. This is slightly below his typical rate for presidential press conferences, and a bit more than half the rate of the George W. Bush pressers that I measured earlier (2.3/4.49 = 51%, to be precise)."