In the Interest of Fairness and Bi-Partisanship
On December 1, President Obama gave a speech outlining his new “surge” strategy for Afghanistan. While there is considerable reason to wonder why it took the President so long to outline this new strategy and why he is insisting on setting a date certain for troop withdrawal, there is little doubt that most Republicans will at the end of the day support the President’s strategy.
So, in the interest of fairness to a Democratic President who has announced a plan that most Republicans will find acceptable (and many if not most Democrats will find unacceptable) I thought I would correct a line of attack that I saw emerge from the right last night, and truth be told even participated in – why didn’t the President talk more about “winning” and “victory”.
So I went back to President Bush’s surge speech from January of 2007 where he outlined his new strategy for Iraq. In that speech, President Bush used the word “win” exactly once and the word “victory” exactly once. Granted, this is twice more than Obama managed in speech twice as long as Bush’s, but it appears that neither Commander-in-Chief felt these speeches were times to dwell on victory, instead placing emphasis on our troops, our security and the new strategy itself. Take a look at the word clouds formed below and see if you can tell which was delivered by which President. I have removed obvious words like Iraq and Afghanistan, but if you look close enough you can figure it out, but only after looking pretty closely. The most telling difference in the two speeches may not be the use of words like “victory” but rather the fact that Bush used the word “I” only 7 times, while Obama managed to work in the pronoun 37 times.
President Bush and our military leaders implemented a surge strategy in Iraq – November saw the fewest civilian casualties in Iraq since the war started. Let us all hope and pray that President Obama and our troops can deliver once again.
- Michael Meyers
Comments on this entry