Obama Oval Office speech analysis provokes unprecedented response
Austin, Texas, July 2, 2010. The first decade of the 21st century has witnessed a great many terrible, sad and historical events, with a few, unfortunately fleeting moments of great joy sprinkled between the dirges. We have done our best to analyze the impact of these events on the global print and electronic media as well as on the Internet, throughout the blogosphere, and now the emerging social media.
After analyzing political speeches for a decade now, as well as all 55 Presidential Inaugural Addresses and transcripts of historical interest (including Washington’s Farewell Address, the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, FDR’s ‘Live in Infamy’ radio address, Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a Dream’ speech) you would think that we had seen and heard everything by now.
However, it wasn’t until our analysis of the President’s Gulf Spill Oval Office address, that we experienced the full force of the Internet’s fury scorned.
And this for an analysis that we considered basically non-newsworthy.
President Obama had given yet another address to the nation. GLM used the same standardized, widely available, language tools that we used to name Obama’s Grant Park ”Yes, we can!” victory address as one that ranked with the greatest of presidential orations. Now these same standardized, time-tested tools are being conveniently criticized as of questionable repute.
We were told that our analysis was either ‘bashing Obama’ or ‘excusing Obama’. At the same time, we were either ‘insulting the people’ or ‘insulting the President’. Finally, it was suggested that we were rather transparently calling for the President to ‘dumb down the rhetoric’ so that one and all might understand the superior intelligence of ‘his highness’. Whoa!
Apparently, many readers never got over the headline, missing the actual analysis and what the numbers told us about the speech. Our concern was that our initial headline, Obama Oil Spill Speech Echoes Elite, Aloof Ethos might be considered demeaning to the President. Wrong. It was considered demeaning to everyone on the Left and the Right.
For general information on the readability tests used by GLM, click here.
For scientific literature about readability tests, enter Flesch or readability into the ERIC database.
We were surprised to learn that offense was, apparently, taken in equal proportions by both the Right (Language Expert: If You Didn’t Like Obama’s Oil Spill Speech, It’s Probably Because You’re Stupid) and the Left (Obama Oil Spill Speech Criticized By CNN’s Language Analyst For Not Being Moronic Enough) of the political spectrum. Nevertheless, we were quite amused by The ColbertReport’s send-up of our (and CNN’s) report, which somehow struck a middle chord.
It was also enlightening to see a significant proportion of this criticism to be ad hominem attacks, focusing on ourselves rather than our analysis. (Read FAQ about GLM and Paul JJ Payack here.)
This past December, we encountered fierce criticism from the Chinese government dailies because we named ‘The Rise of China” as the No. 1 news story of the decade. (You can follow the narrative arc of this controversy here. ) But the criticism that accompanied the Obama Gulf Spill speech, was a good bit nastier, indeed.
Our analyses of the three preceding US Presidential elections were praised from many quarters from the New York Times to Nicholas Kristof to NPR to the worldwide media. During the preceding ten years, few alleged political motivation, or denounced the standard language-measurement tools as inherently flawed. In fact, as long as readers basically agreed with the more predictable outcomes, there were few complaints. Here were some of those results: Ross Perot scored the lowest we’ve ever recorded, John F, Kennedy and Ronald Reagan were stars, both Bushes settled in the middle of the middle school years, and Obama’s ‘Yes, we can!’ speech had nearly equivalent numbers to Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream’ speech and Lincoln’s ‘Gettysburg Address’. So far, so good. We did have a few outliers, such as Sarah Palin achieving quite a high score during her debate with Joe Biden, which was duly noted by New York Magazine and quite easy to explain.
Here’s what we attempted to communicate:
1. Obama’s speech, though deserving a ‘solid B’ did not live up to his past efforts.
2. Obama’s most well-regarded speech came in a at 7.4 grade level. This is not talking down to the American people. This is communicating clear and concisely to his audience. This is Obama at his best, communicating with a deft combination of vision, passion and rhetoric.
In fact, our headline for that effort read: Obama’s “Yes, We Can” Speech Ranked with “I have a Dream,” “Tear Down this Wall,” and JFK Inaugural. Rather high praise, indeed.
Our commentary read:
Obama’s “Yes, We Can” speech delivered Tuesday night in Chicago’s Grant Park ranked favorably in tone, tenor and rhetorical flourishes with memorable political addresses of the recent past including Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a Dream” speech, “Tear Down this Wall,” by Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address.
“As is appropriate for a forward-looking message of hope and reconciliation, words of change and hope, as well as future-related constructions dominated the address,” said Paul JJ Payack President and Chief Word Analyst of the Global Language Monitor. “Evidently, Obama is at his best at connecting with people at the 7th to 8th grade range, communicating directly to his audience using simple yet powerful rhetorical devices, such as the repetition of the cadenced phrase ‘Yes, we can’, which built to a powerful conclusion.”
Well-regarded, indeed (and well-deserved).
3. GLM and our predecessor site, yourDictionary.com have analyzed every presidential inaugural since that of George Washington. The idea was, and continues to be, to look at the presidents’ words in the total historical context of the American presidency.
In 2001, we were quoted as saying,
Our goal was to spot trends that are all to easily overlooked in the political (and all too partisan) passions of the moment” [and continued that our] analysis included patterns of word usage choices, the use of such grammatical constructions as passive voice, the length of words and sentences, the number of paragraphs, and other parameters of language to gauge the content [including] the well-regarded Flesch-Kincaid Reading Scale.
4. The use of Industry-standard language analytics. The Fogg Index, the Flesch Test, the Flesch-Kinkaid Reading Scale, and many others, are used in all forms of publishing from technical manuals to ensuring proper comprehension levels for textbooks used for various ages and classes. This has been true for more than fifty years.
The reason we choose to use the standard tests and analytical tools was a simple one: to enable the same set of measurements over any period of time. And also that these analyses could be replicated by scholars and historians and journalists the world over.
5. We use our proprietary tool, the Predictive Quantities Indicator or PQI to measure media analytics, narrative tracking, and TrendTopper Media Buzz, as such we do not use the PQI for this task.
By the Way, here are a few historical precedents;
- Washington’s Farewell Address of 1796 — 12.0.
- Lincoln-Douglas debates, 1858 — Stephen Douglas’ seven speeches averaged a 12th-grade level 11.9; Lincoln’s averaged 11.2.
- President Franklin Roosevelt’s declaration of war in December 1941 — 11.5.
- Nixon-Kennedy Debates, 1960 — The first nationally televised debates: Kennedy, 9.6 ; Nixon, 9.1.
- Carter-Ford Debates, 1976 — Carter, 10.4; Ford, 11.0.
- Carter-Reagan debate — Carter, 12.0; Reagan, 10.7.
- Reagan-Mondale debates — Reagan, 9.8; Mondale, 8.7.
- Dukakis-Bush debates of 1988 — Dukakis, 8.9; Bush, 6.7 grade.
- Bush-Clinton-Perot debates of 1992 — Carter, 8.5, Bush, 6.5, Perot, 6.3.
- Bush-Gore debate of 2000 — Bush, 7.1, Gore, 8.4.
- Cheney-Lieberman, V.P. Debate — Lieberman, 9.9; Dick Cheney, 9.1.
And for good measure, Hamlet’s ‘To Be or Not to Be Soliloquy’, Shakespeare, c. 1600, comes in at 10.6.
Now Kathleen Parker has considerably upped the ante when applied readability statistics in her premise about Barack Obama as the first ‘feminine president’ ….
