E Plural-us Unum

Chris Matthews has finally shined a light on why politicians of all stripes are so insufferable — all they do is talk about themselves! Who wants to spend time with someone like that? Granted, considering that the politician is selling self-as-product, a certain amount of self-reference is necessary. But the more election coverage to which I subject myself, the more I feel like I'm watching Marcia Brady run a brush through her hair 100 times before crawling between perfumed sheets.

Let's take a look at Hillary Clinton's perhaps best-known speech, "It Takes a Village to Raise a Child". The word "I" appears 13 times in the first 15 sentences ("thank you thank you thank you's" excluded).

Now let's contrast that against Barack Obama's keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Convention, where in just as many sentences he uses the word "I" zero times. And — here's the kicker — it's his life story he's talking about! There's another word that tends to pop up in Obama's speeches that Clinton doesn't seem to know much about: We. Regardless of whether there are any substantive policy differences between the two — and I'm not convinced that there are — Obama seems to be selling people themselves; the notion that we are capable of taking meaningful political action, not merely capable of selecting some other person-product to do it for us.

There's another politician who liked that "we" word a lot, and the day he became president he said, " We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution." Not "I will carry on the spirit the revolution" but "we are the revolution together." This is not to say that Barack Obama is any John F. Kennedy, but at least he can recognize a product worth peddling.

I wish more politicians would take a page out of that book. If I wanted to hear people talk about themselves ad nauseum, I'd let my teenage students hang out in my classroom at lunch.