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.

Obama 2.0: It’s the economy, stupid! (but it wasn’t in 2008)

Over the next few months, we’ll be analysing the speeches of the US election campaign. To start off with, we’ll be comparing some of the early speeches of the two main candidates with each other, and their equivalents 4 years ago.

Image from: http://thecomingdepression.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/fundamentally-changing-america-obama.html (21/06/12)

   The biggest issue of both the upcoming and previous US election is obvious: the economy. So you’d expect it to feature prominently in Obama’s speeches of both campaigns. Yet, not only are economic words, terms and topics occurring far more frequently this time around: many appear for the first time.

  Much has been made of Romney’s pitch being as ‘America’s CEO’, and Obama’s early rhetoric for the campaign seems to respond to this. Words ‘debut-ing’ in his campaign lexis include ‘businesses’, ‘financial’, ‘investments’ and ‘growth’. And some of those on the right will no doubt feel rather gleeful and smug at the simultaneous introductions of ‘deficit’ and ‘trillion’. It seems Obama is incorporating more ‘business speak’ than 2008. He is certainly yet to reach the heights of soaring rhetoric we have seen from him. Perhaps the plan is to leave that for later, while establishing his economic capability to entrepreneurs, business leaders, and the more right-leaning economic thinkers. Interestingly, in 2008 Obama seemed uninterested in talk of ‘getting the economy moving’, and ‘moving’ itself appears for the first time.

   This introduction of ‘business speak’ is mirrored in the wider trend or speeches more focussed on the economy. ‘Cut’, ‘cuts’, ‘tax’, and ‘economy’ all appear more often this time around, as Obama shifts from inspiring to dependable - not to mention a greater emphasis on sustainable economics, and living within budgets. Of course, while this is partly down to the position of the economy and the nature of his opponent, it’s not unusual for the incumbent to talk about the economy. Firstly, it’s an ever-useful excuse for what the government hasn’t done; and secondly, at this moment some economists are saying positive things about parts of the US economy. Added to that, Obama played the 'outsider' card heavily in the last election, placing less emphasis on the issues themselves. There were policies, but it was personality that took precedent. Even when it was policy, it was more principles than programs. This time, Obama is known, and so he doesn't need to - and cannot - play the same game.

   

   This wooing of the centre-right will no doubt form a part of the Obama Camp’s dream scenario of leading the polls heading into the final straight, when (one imagines) they will shift to a more rousing tenor.

Either way, Obama seems to be taking on the (rather invisible) Romney on his own terms. For now.

Power to the people?

This is the third post in a short series analysing how the PM changed his rhetoric after he got into government. It compares how a number of themes are presented in his campaign speeches vs his early speeches as PM, based on close, statistical, lingusitic analysis.

Taken from: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=415741 (06/05/2012; 16:27)

'We can be a Government that always remembers we serve the people, we're the servants of the people we are never their masters and this if we are elected we will never, ever forget.'

- David Cameron, 5th May 2012

People are the masters. Politicians serve. Serving to lead. The electorate empowered. The ballot is boss. That’s very much the message David Cameron was evoking in the quotation above, and throughout his campaign in 2010. Indeed, in office he was still saying ‘[i]t's about holding our hands up saying we haven't got all the answers - let's work them out, together.’ Not quite the same, but the similar thought.

So is this what has come to define Cameron’s government? What do the early days, his words in his first year tell us? The previous quotation notwithstanding, there’s a shift.

Firstly, and perhaps fairly, Cameron moves away from any suggestion of the public having direct power. In his campaign he had used ‘if you’ a load of times - and only a small handful were ‘if you vote Conservative’ or ‘if you get a Conservative government’. Most of all, he talked about the people’s power to ‘change’ things ‘if you want’. All of this, along with with ‘you can’ and ‘you want’, nearly disappear after the election, as Cameron puts less emphasis on both possibility and people power.

Then, while ‘politicians’ appear alongside ‘serve’, ‘serving’ or ‘servants’ quite a few times pre-election, he never uses them together as PM. The same is true of ‘people’ and ‘masters’ - lots before, never after. What’s more, his calls to ‘hold us to account’ occur only as campaign rhetoric, and are dropped afterwards.

In fact, this ‘holding to account’ ties in with one of the big vanishing acts of Cameron’s speeches: his much-vaunted contracts. Cameron made 5 speeches specifically about these ‘contracts’, and at the first launch said ‘I urge people to read it, to hold us to it, to make sure we deliver it.’ It was a clear democratic tactic and offer to involve people more in politics - something which Cameron continually emphasized in this, and in his use of ‘invitations’.

So: how does that go for us? Well, surprisingly for such a massive chunk of the election campaign, it totally disappears. Totally. Utterly. In one speech Cameron refers to employers’ contracts with their workers - and this is the only use of the word in the twelve months after the election! The same is true for ‘invitation’: never used. And for ‘manifesto’.

Statistics are always a little tricky to be objective and substantiative with - but no mentions at all?? As a fan of Cameron’s ‘invitations’ and ‘contracts’ pre-election, I’m a little disappointed (if not that surprised) that it may all have been electoral bluster.

Comments always welcomed.

Whatever happened to the (Northern) Irish?

This is the second post in a short series analysing how the PM changed his rhetoric right after he got into government. It compares how a number of themes are presented in his campaign speeches vs his early speeches as PM, based on close, statistical, linguistic analysis.

Taken from: http://www.newsletter.co.uk/news/politics/ni-is-british-now-let-s-govern-says-cameron-1-2757478 (26/05/2012; 23:00)

Just a very brief post (more of a comment, really) about one thing Cameron said in his campaign, which sets up the next blog post nicely.

As you’ll have seen if you read the last post, David Cameron was a lot more inclusive in his campaign speeches than in his speeches once he got into office. I thought I’d just share one more neat little example of this with you now.

On his visit to Northern Ireland, Cameron was all about bringing Northern Ireland into ‘mainstream politics’. He said he wanted,

‘to enable people in Northern Ireland to play their full part in the affairs of the country as a whole, and to realise at long last the basic democratic right to equal citizenship within the United Kingdom.’

Cameron said it was time to Northern Ireland to be re-enfranchised, and play its central role in UK politics. Funny, then, that they don’t play a very full part in his own rhetoric once he gets through the election. In fact, in the year following the election he only mentions them 4 times (usually in a list with Wales and Scotland) - that's only once more that the Republic of Ireland! So much for being inclusive, and so much for the Northern Irish playing ‘their full part in the affairs of the country as a whole’!

Like I said, just a comment for this post - but it neatly ties together the last post of Cameron’s decreasingly inclusive speeches, and the next one in this series: which will be all about who Cameron really says holds the power.

Comments always welcomed.

I, Cameron

This is the first post in a short series analysing how the PM changed his rhetoric right after he got into government. It compares how a number of themes are presented in his campaign speeches vs his early speeches as PM, based on close, statistical, linguistic analysis.

Taken from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/election-2010/7682813/General-Election-2010-David-Cameron-
makes-last-ditch-appeal-to-Labour-voters.html (26/05/2012; 23:00)

‘...we have called this manifesto an invitation to join the government of Britain...People power not state power. Big Society not big government. We're all in this together.’ - David Cameron, April 13th 2010

So said David Cameron as he launched his election campaign back in 2010. But how did that work out for everyone? Certainly his continued assertions that ‘we’re all in this together’ put some of us on constant alert, in case Cameron and his team decided to bust out some poorly-judged homage to High School Musical. Or maybe that was just me.

But what happened once he got into office? Well, I’ve been looking at how Cameron himself puts things, in his speeches, and started to see something interesting.

Before the election, Cameron is constantly using ‘we’ and ‘your’ - ‘we all’, ‘we’ll...make sure you are in charge’, and ‘your government’. ‘We’ is pretty much is most used word during the campaign. He even goes as far as saying, ‘we’re’ not ‘really fighting Gordon Brown or Nick Clegg.’ So, we're all one big happy family, then? Yet, once we get past the election, stats show that Cameron uses ‘we’ far less (and generally to refer to the government, not the public) - and ‘your government’ is consigned to the Steve Hilton’s bottom draw, along with ‘your community’ and ‘your country’.

In their place, we got a lot more ‘I’ and ‘me’. Cameron seems to shift into a presidential role. No longer your friendly neighbour who you’re ‘in it together’ with. Instead of inclusively saying ‘you’ and ‘we’, now it’s ‘you’ and ‘I’ that start to appear together. Cameron starts talking about what ‘I know’, ‘I can’, and ‘I believe’.

Suddenly - having railed against the idea that ‘politicians...know best’ in his campaign - Cameron now seems to want people to leave it to him, and to trust him, specifically. Before the election, Cameron distanced himself from his own party (talking about a future ‘Conservative government’, rather than the ‘Conservative party’ of the past and present’) - and afterwards he seems to distance himself from the public. It’s not uncommon for PMs to do this - but with his party in a delicate coalition, and a perception that he’s an ‘arrogant posh boy’, perhaps he’d do well to be a little less presidential?

Comments always welcomed.