Rhetorical inventory of Obama’s budget, deficit speech reveals talking points, strategy

The torrent of news stories, analyses, editorials, columns and blog posts about President Obama’s speech on his budget plan focused, appropriately, on the numbers.

But there’s another way to look at it: analyzing the speaker’s words in ways that reveal as much about the content as the dollar signs that pepper its paragraphs. This approach employs a tool that linguists rely on in their study of human language. It’s a concordance, an alphabetical list of the principal words in a text that can be sorted by the number of times they are used.

President Barack Obama outlines his fiscal policy during an address at George Washington University in Washington, Wednesday, April 13, 2011. (Charles Dharapak/AP)

Before computers, generating these rhetorical inventories was such an arduous, time-consuming project that they were limited to literature’s big guns: The Works of Shakespeare, the Bible, Koran and the Vedas, the oldest scriptures of Hinduism.

Now digitized texts and software make a concordance just a few keystrokes away.

One of the simplest concordances are those that crunch word frequencies to view patterns, like the one that the British newspaper The Guardian produced in 2010, comparing Obama’s first State of the Union speech with those delivered by George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt,  John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush “to see where president’s focus lay.” There are also other ways language lovers can aim a spotlight on a politician’s rhetorical skill or lack thereof.

Word frequencies (selected ever-so-carefully by speechwriters, spin doctors and political consultants) offer another prism to examine the messages behind Obama’s attempt to seize control of an issue as vital — and polarizing — as reducing the federal deficit and the path the President wants to take to achieve that goal.

Here are three examples.

As in any speech, what isn’t mentioned is often as revealing as what is. Here are words that President Obama did not use in his speech:

• Entitlements
• Rich
• Welfare
• Redistribution
• Hope

This concordance was created using DEVONthink software.