Examining President Obama's State of the Union Word Usage From 2009-2011

Just like with any other US president, President Obama's State of the Union addresses are heavily scrutinized by the entire world.

Media outlets enjoy pointing out certain words that presidents use or don't use during their State of the Union addresses.

I thought that it would be interesting to take this a step further.

I wrote a little bit of code that takes President Obama's three State of the Union addresses (2009, 2010 and 2011) and figures out how many times he used a word during each of the addresses. The code then analyzed the keywords and compared their usage in 2011 to previous years (2009 and 2010).

In total, President Obama has used 3,093 different words during his three State of the Union addresses (including boring words such as "the" and "of". I picked out some of the more interesting words that I thought that you would be interested in.

"taxes"

2009 - 1
2010 - 8
2011 - 2

Note: So, President Obama used the word "taxes" once during his 2009 State of the Union address, 8 times during his 2010 address and twice in 2011.

"health"

2009 - 20
2010 - 11
2011 - 7

"deficit"

2009 - 9
2010 - 10
2011 - 10

"debt"

2009 - 6
2010 - 5
2011 - 1

"jobs"

2009 - 14
2010 - 23
2011 - 25

"economy"

2009 - 22
2010 - 15
2011 - 7

"change"

2009 - 2
2010 - 9
2011 - 5

"Republicans"

2009 - 3
2010 - 6
2011 - 9

"trillion"

2009 - 2
2010 - 6
2011 - 1

"recovery"

2009 - 11
2010 - 8
2011 - 0

"business"

2009 - 6
2010 - 10
2011 - 12

"tax"

2009 - 10
2010 - 13
2011 - 10

"spending"

2009 - 2
2010 - 5
2011 - 11

"prosperity"

2009 - 5
2010 - 4
2011 - 1

"future"

2009 - 10
2010 - 6
2011 - 15

"budget"

2009 - 13
2010 - 5
2011 - 2

"war"

2009 - 4
2010 - 4
2011 - 4

"troops"

2009 - 1
2010 - 4
2011 - 6

"responsibility"

2009 - 10
2010 - 4
2011 - 6

"China"

2009 - 1
2010 - 2
2011 - 4

"education"

2009 - 14
2010 - 5
2011 - 11

"terrorists"

2009 - 2
2010 - 2
2011 - 1

"Iraq"

2009 - 4
2010 - 3
2011 - 3

"banks"

2009 - 10
2010 - 8
2011 - 1



Filed under: General Knowledge



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