Now we're all in this together?

Having played the 'outsider' card heavily in 2008, Barack Obama is now the ultimate Washington insider: the President. And his speeches show that he's trying his hardest to overcome the problem. Over the next few months, we’ll be analysing the speeches of the US election campaign. This post looks at how Obama is positioning himself in his rhetoric.

Image from: http://browniemariepublishing.com/The-Brownie.html (28/06/12)

They say that obsession with an enemy leads you to become like them. Well, in this election campaign, Barack Obama is desperate to prove that he has not become the very people he took on in 2008.

Obama’s 2008 campaign was a masterpiece in whipping up grassroots support. And it creating a sense that he was being lifted up from everyday society towards the Washington, rather than a politicians who reaches out to the nation, of who embodies what an ‘everyman’ would be in Washington.

In 2012, he seems to be going even more for this vein (or, at least, less subtly). With the new campaign, Obama has avoided talking so much about himself - after all, his profile is already high enough, and people do feel they know him (though David Axelrod has banned any complacency on that score).

So, this time around, the stats of his speeches show us a few things. We are seeing far less about Obama, and more about ‘everybody’, ‘you’ and ‘we’. Some things are less of an issue now, and so we see fewer uses of ‘black’, ‘white’, ‘race’ and ‘racial’. However, we also see less use of ‘I’, and far fewer references to his opponent.

In their place, inclusive language is the order of the day: ‘you’, ‘we’re’, ‘folks’, ‘we’ve’, ‘everybody’. Obama seems to be trying harder than ever to prove that he is still the outsider in Washington. Many of you will remember the attacks he made on John McCain, claiming that McCain could not change Washington, because he embodied Washington. Well, now Obama is desperately trying to prove that he’s not become the very thing he was fighting.