President Obama opened his first “State of the Nation” speech (transcript here) to a joint session of Congress on February 24, 2009 by telling the nation “we will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before.” The tone is optimistic as expected, and provided some references to changes in behavior necessary, as expected. The latter may or may not have gone far enough, depending on who you ask.
One of the reasons to listen is to understand in what order the newly minted Chief Executive will tackle the list of pressing problems. I figure applying one of social media’s most common analysis tools may provide us insight into what President Obama’s priorities may be relative to each other. As expected, words like “American”, “now” (to create urgency no doubt) and “economy” were high in frequency in the speech, but there were some surprises also. The word “health” showed up more frequently than did “education”, which in turn was more frequent than “energy”, maybe suggesting priorities. The word “responsibility” was frequently used as well — a nod to the popular feeling that government hasn’t been accountable in years.
Full Wordie-derived word cloud below: