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Yesterday, Marc Cenedella did a sort of Breakfast Experiment™, and reported the results in "I, Obama: The President and the personal pronoun":

President Obama has taken criticism in some sectors for his use of the personal pronoun in describing, and applauding, the nation’s success in covert operations. So I’ve spent my Saturday morning at the outstanding website of The American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara to find out what happens when Presidents speak to the CIA.

I picked twelve notable addresses from Presidential speeches at the CIA’s Langley headquarters over the past 52 years and run [sic] the numbers.

This is a big step forward, relative to most of the discussion of this overblown media obsession that we've seen over the past couple of years. As I wrote the last time the business of Obama's first-person singular pronouns came up,

There are two problems with this meme. The first problem is that frequency of FPS pronoun use is not in fact correlated with the personality traits that they associate with it (and with Obama). (For discussion and references, see "What is 'I' saying?", 8/9/2009.) The second problem is that Obama's empirical frequency of FPSP use is in fact on the low side, when you compare his speeches, press conferences, interviews, etc. to similar performances by other recent presidents. (For discussion and references, see "Fact-checking George F. Will, one more time", 10/6/2009.)

In this context, there are two good things about Mr. Cenedella's post. The first good thing is that he actually counted pronouns. The second good thing is that he compared this result to the counts in a set of roughly comparable speeches.

This is in striking contrast to (for example) George F. Will, Peggy Noonan, Charles Krauthamer, and Stanley Fish, who made similar sorts of claims about specific speeches without counting or comparing. In those and other similar meme-bleats from the media herd, the facts were objectively embarrassing: the rate of first-person-singular pronoun use in the speeches they cited was in fact comparable to or lower than the rates found in speeches over the years by other politicians in similar situations.

Now in fact, this is pretty much what Cenedella found. Here's his graph:

He finds Obama's I-usage rates to be high enough to motivate the question

So is President Obama the most egotistical president since Nixon, or simply a leader who believes in direct and personal communication?

But the differences are not all that large, and Cenedella's evaluation even mentions the idea that we ought to go beyond mere blind counting, and look at how and why people use first-person singular pronouns:

Wearing my partisan hat, I’d have to say it is rather jarring to read Obama’s addresses after all those who came before him. There is clearly a different tenor, a different tone, and a different conception of the relationship between the man of the Oval Office and the Agency.

But putting a longer lens on it, we must also note that the present situation is one in which the nation’s security is primarily secured by the type of specialized, professional operations conducted by the CIA and special forces teams.

And with my CEO hat, I’d note that leadership sometimes requires the ‘I’ and not the ‘we’. In times of crisis, or in situations where significant or substantial organizational hurdles block the path to success, it can be the case that the leader needs to switch from the congratulatory ‘we’ to the responsibility and accountability of the ‘I’.

So far, so good.

But there are two problems with the whole exercise, one strictly numerical and the other interpretive.

The numerical problem is that some of Cenedella's counts, and also the corresponding arithmetic, seem to be wrong. And correcting the numbers pretty much destroys his case, such as it is. Thus for Bush 2's first CIA speech, he counts 10 I's in what looks from his graph like a bit more than 500 words. He plots this as about 1.6%. My FPSP-counting script gets:

12 i

3 my

2 me

2 i've

1 i'm

599 words, 15 I's (2.50 percent), 20 FPSP (3.34 percent)

(I don't know why Cenedella decided to count only I and not my, me, mine, etc. — but the effect is pretty much the same either way.)

Running the same script on Obama's most recent speech to the CIA, I get

35 i

7 my

3 me

2 i'm

1 i've

1742 words, 38 I's (2.18 percent), 48 FPSP (2.76 percent)

So comparing these two speeches, Obama's rate of I-usage was 13% less than W's (2.18% vs. 2.50%), and his overall rate of first-person-singular-pronoun usage was 17% less (2.76% vs. 3.34%). Does this mean that Obama is less egocentric or less responsible and accountable or whatever? I don't think so — but it does suggest to me that Cenedella's subjective impression of Obama's speech might be telling us more about Cenedella than about Obama:

Wearing my partisan hat, I’d have to say it is rather jarring to read Obama’s addresses after all those who came before him. There is clearly a different tenor, a different tone, and a different conception of the relationship between the man of the Oval Office and the Agency.

Checking a couple of Cenedella's other counts, I found some even larger discrepancies. Thus for Clinton's second address to the CIA, Cenedella's graphs show about 36 I-words in a bit more than 2500 total words, for a rate of a bit less than 1.5%. My script gets very different counts, and therefore a very different percentage:

15 i

3 me

1 i've

1641 words, 16 I's (0.98 percent), 19 FPSP (1.16 percent)

And in JFK's address, which Cenedella counts as around 7 I's in 500 words, for a rate of a bit more than 1.5%, almost a third of the transcript is JFK reading the citation for Alan Dulles's National Security Medal. (Awarding that medal was the central point of that presidential visit and speech.) Removing the quoted citation, which of course entirely lacks first-person pronouns, I get

9 i

2 my

2 i'm

1 i'd

344 words, 12 I's (3.49 percent), 14 FPSP (4.07 percent)

Which seems to make JFK the champion egotist by far — if we believed that these numbers meant anything in themselves, which I don't.

(I don't know how Mr. Cenedella's numbers came out so far off — in some cases, I suspect that he counted by hand, and simply missed some instances; in other cases, such as the puzzling Clinton numbers, he may have clicked over to the wrong speech. In any case, he's to be commended for giving us not only his numbers but also links to the specific documents that he derived them from.)

The second problem is interpretive.

Cenedella has some plausible thoughts on why a president might use first-person singular pronouns ("… leadership sometimes requires the ‘I’ and not the ‘we’. In times of crisis, … the leader needs to switch from the congratulatory ‘we’ to the responsibility and accountability of the ‘I’"). This is a useful addition to the distinction that James Pennebaker draws in "What is 'I' saying?", 8/9/2009, between the "graceful I", which is polite, hedging, respectful of multiple perspectives, through more reportorial phrases like "I saw", to "egotistical, controlling sledgehammer I's". And there are other kinds of first-person singular pronoun uses as well — references in informal opening remarks ("Someone told me that Secretary Cohen was here, but I haven't seen him yet"); promises of action ("I intend to continue to work with Congress to make sure that our law enforcement officials at home have got the tools necessary"), and so on.

Give these large interpretive differences among different sorts of FPSP usage, simple counts are going to be a very weak signal at best. So there's an obvious next step. If you think that such counts are useful indicators, then you really should decide on a taxonomy of FPSP types, assign individual instances to those categories, check inter-annotator agreement rates, and draw conclusions — if any — based on statistics over these disambiguated categories.

My own opinion, FWIW, is that this would turn out to be a difficult annotation task, requiring a lot of careful work to define the categories and to train annotators. I'm not convinced that we would learn much from applying the process to political speeches. And at this point, the commentariat's obsession with this aspect of President Obama's speeches still lacks any empirical plausibility, despite Mr. Cenedella's efforts.

Past LLOG posts on related subjects:

"Recommended reading", 5/3/2011

""A sociopath and narcissist and manipulator"", 8/9/2010

"Open fraud as Op-Ed discourse", 7/10/2010

"Them there I's", 2/11/2010

"Fact-checking George F. Will, one more time", 10/6/2010

"What is 'I' saying?", 8/9/2009

"'I' is a camera", 7/18/2009

"I again", 7/13/2009

"Another pack member heard from", 6/9/2009

"Royal Baloney", 6/9/2009

"Inaugural pronouns", 6/8/2009

"Obama's Imperial 'I': spreading the meme", 6/8/2009

"Fact-checking George F. Will", 6/7/2009

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