Presidential Inaugurals

Following Obama's Victory Speech earlier this week, the news media informed us that it was one of his best speeches yet. I don't dispute that, despite my belief that ideas matter and his aren't that good. But I wanted to see how Obama's speech compares to other speeches in American history. Now it isn't always easy to get your hands on victory speeches, b/c American President-elects didn't always give them. I compared his speech to Bush's speeches and Clinton's victory speeches using a tool that calculates a bunch of statistics of how complex your language is. One statistic, more commonly quoted is apparently called the Flesch-Kincaid grade level. According to this statistic, Obama's speech wasn't that much different from the more recent Victory Speeches.

However, I decided to go further back, mainly out of an interest in finding old Presidential speeches/addresses to see how politicians used to talk to Americans. So I found all of the inaugural speeches for Presidents since 1896 (since McKinley bridges both centuries I included both of his) and ran them through this tool. The tool provides many different statistics of how complex different texts are and I don't really know enough to tell which ones are best. So I created a Z-Statistic for one and then averaged them all to create one single value for each President(the negative of Flesch reading ease tests were used). Z-statistics are a little unrealistic, but I'm just using them as the first-best method of simplification. I couldn't find Eisenhower's 1956 speech, so I just assumed they had the same values (not realistic, but only used for creating the statistic).

While his speech is not an inaugural address and this method isn't perfect, Obama falls in at 27 of 29. For a speech listed as his best, it fails the complexity of language test. Surprisingly, Bush's second inaugural used quite complex language, as well as Nixon's inaugural speech. Clinton's first speech was not as "good" as either of Reagan's (by this standard), but his second was.

A final problem I didn't note is that since we have had television, these speeches have definitely changed. Earlier speeches mostly ran in the newspapers, are longer and could be thought of as like a State of the Union Address that we would see today. I took the time to read Coolidge and Taft's speeches to get a feel for them and they lay out all sorts of policies in much further detail than current ones do. Compare that to Bush I's speech where he talks in generalities and a Thousand Points of Light, but nothing specific. Here's another surprising fact, Bush II's second inaugural was the most complex inaugural since television began.

A well-received speech doesn't necessarily mean it was well-written or at a high grade level. It is as much true that you need to deliver the speech properly. Based on my analysis, I think the MSM is thinking more of the delivery of his speech rather than necessarily the content or eloquence of his speech. I did my best to quantify the eloquence, but the content is left to you.

Or you could think that the media is just completely biased for this guy (mi amigo, my compatriot, that one, my friend).

Note: For reference, if you add in MLK's "I have a dream" speech, it is close to Reagan's second inaugural. This post would fall between T. Roosevelt and Bush II.