Barack Obama covered a range of topics in his final State of the Union speech on Jan. 12. He reminded the American people of his achievements, like the Affordable Care Act and the killing of Osama Bin Laden, and rebutted the notion surfaced in the Republican primary debates that the United States military has grown weaker. But when you cut through the rhetoric and political posturing, what did he really focus on? What were the actual words he used the most?
We counted each word in last night’s speech, as well as each word in every State of the Union address ever given, to find the words that were used the most. We filtered out common articles like “the,” “and,” and “or,” as well as many terms that are inherently ubiquitous in the State of the Union, like “United States” and “Americans.” The result gives us a sense of what each president, since 1790, focused on in his State of the Union address.
Correction: Due to an error in our algorithm, this list previously listed Grover Cleveland’s second term under Benjamin Harrison. It also included instances of the word “government,” which were meant to be filtered out.
Notes on methodology: The words displayed are the three with the most frequent occurrences; the leftmost word is the one used the most. Our algorithm counted only single words, which is why phrases like “health care” come up as “health” and “care” for Bill Clinton. Most of the words we filtered out were used frequently in every speech, like “United,” “States,” “America,” “Congress,” “Senate,” “Federal.” To whittle the words down to those that were the most interesting, we further filtered out words like “department,” “commission,” and “administration.”
