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Mary Kate Cary ("Barack Obama Journeys From 'Yes We Can' to the Imperial 'I'", U.S. News and World Report, 6/9/2009) joins the media chorus:

"The Great I Am." That's what Dorothy Walker Bush, the matriarch of the Bush family, used to call it when one of her children used too many "I's" in a sentence. Casting it in biblical terms, she'd tell them, "Nobody likes The Great I Am. Don't be talking about yourself." […]

I tell you all this because I've noticed lately that President Obama used to be that way, too. […]

But lately he's moved from the second person to the first person. Apparently I'm not the only one who's picked up on it. Stanley Fish blogs in the New York Times that [… etc. …]

George Will's column earlier this week points out that the president has become "inordinately fond of the first-person singular pronoun," as evidenced in the GM takeover speech. Terence Jeffrey of CSN wrote a similar piece about the same speech titled "I, Barack," talking about the economic implications of the switch from "we" to "I" […]

As pointed out at tedious length in a series of earlier posts, the only trouble with this theory is that Barack Obama uses "The Great I Am" at a significantly lower rate, in comparable speeches and press interactions, than either Bill Clinton or George W. Bush did.

Since Ms. Cary — identified as "a former White House speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush" — brings up the elder Bush as a paragon of I-lessness, let's do another comparison of Inaugural Addresses:

Document Word count 1st sing. count 1st sing. percent GHW Bush Inaugural (1989) 2291 39 1.7% BH Obama Inaugural (2009) 2409 5 0.2%

So, in point of fact, Obama's inaugural address used the first-person singular 8 times less often, in percentage terms, than Bush 41's inaugural did.

OK, how about their first press conferences, which are more informal and thus likely to have a higher rate of first-singular pronoun uses?

Document Word count 1st sing. count 1st sing. percent GHW Bush (1/27/1989) 4600 252 5.48% BH Obama (2/9/2009) 7775 206 2.65%

So in this setting, Obama used The Great I Am less than half as often as Bush 41, in percentage terms.

Oh, and in that GM takeover speech that Cary (following the rest of the pack) singles out, Obama used first-singular pronouns at a rate of merely 1.7%. Compare George H.W. Bush's Radio Address to the Nation on the Economy (2/22/1992), where first-person singular pronouns achieved the rate of 4.5%, more than two and a half times more frequent.

I try not to think badly of others, really I do. But people like Cary, Will, Fish, and Jeffrey make it hard to maintain the pretense that members of our punditocracy are either rational or honest. I wonder who'll brainlessly replicate the meme next?

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