The Era of "I"

Our nation has undergone quite a few language changes over 200+ years.  When the nation first formed, people were reluctant to even call it a nation, only a confederacy of independent states.  As time went on, our country was called "The United States of America", and was referred to in the plural.  After the Civil War, the term "United States" no longer was referred to in the plural.  This represented our union as states and citizens, coming together to form one great nation. 

In the last couple decades, another change has occurred: The change from "we" to "I".  Looking back at the speeches of many Presidents throughout the 20th century, the pattern was typical:

Calvin Coolidge: "We need more of the Office Desk and less of the Show Window in politics. Let men in office substitute the midnight oil for the limelight."

Franklin Roosevelt: "If we can boondoggle ourselves out of this depression, that word is going to be enshrined in the hearts of the American people for years to come."

John F. Kennedy: "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty."

Ronald Reagan: "Above all, we must realize that no arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today's world do not have."

Of course they made statements in the first person from time to time, but the idea used to be that Presidents were representatives of the people.  They spoke to the population and for the population, not just at the population.  Ronald Reagan was especially good at bringing people into the conservative movement by empashizing that he was not the one making it work; it was the free individuals of the nation, working to better themselves, that truly made the country great.  That type of vision encouraged unity and a sense of belonging to a tremendous movement, all while supporting individualism and personal freedom.

In recent years, the "we" in all of the Presidential speeches has been changed to "I".  Bill Clinton was one of the first Presidents to really take the focus off of the "we", but that was mostly because all of his statements started with "I promise you" and "I did not...".  Constantly trying to get out of trouble for 2 terms removed any notion in the American people that Bill Clinton was a representative of the U.S. population.  George W. Bush was on the "we" bandwagon immediately after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  He constantly gave speeches showing that we as a nation were going to stand up to terrorism worldwide.  But, as W's tenure in the White House went on, he started to focus more on doing what he thought was "compassionate" rather than what the people wanted (i.e. amnesty, stimulus, bailouts).  These items were not pursued from the standpoint of the a representative of the American people, but from a man who really wanted to do good personally in spite of the thoughts of his constituents.

That brings us to today.  Barack Obama ran a campaign of "hope" and "change", all the while making sure people thought he was a deity.  The media did their part, building him up and inflating the already-huge ego of Obama to a tremendous size. Using the same old tricks of demagoguery that have been putting Democrats in office for almost 200 years, Obama soared into the Oval Office on a populist wave.  Once inaugurated, Obama soon discarded any notion of a populism and soon started going on his own path: that of statism.  In speech after speech, issue after issue, Obama saw it as his own personal duty to bestow his grace upon the people, whether they liked it or not.  If the people agreed with Obama, it was because he convinced them with the power of his personality.  If the people didn't agree, then Obama just hasn't told them enough times yet.  As if the aura of arrogance couldn't get any worse, Obama recently gave a speech where he said "I" 132 times.  If the speech was 1 hour long, Obama would have referred to himself more than twice every minute.

Clearly, Obama doesn't see himself as a representative of the people.  He is the chosen one, a ruler that has been annointed and cannot be held back by the wishes of the plebians.  He doesn't use "we" because the only person in his mind is himself.  Our government was established "by the people, for the people, and from the people".  Obama is acting as if his power was attained "by manipulating the people, for controlling the people, and from the wallets of the people."  But there is a bright side to all of this blatant self-centeredness.  Remember the story of Narcissus (where the word narcissism comes from).  He was so entralled by his own reflection in the water that he lost all sight of the world around him.  It will be really hard for Obama to win in 2012 if he can't stop looking at his own reflection in everything he does.