Like many others, I heard President Obama's speech to Congress last night. My TV isn't connected to anything but a DVD player, so I listened to it on NPR. The speech talked about the responsibilities of the administration, Congress, and American citizens. It made reference to political battles, but did not draw strong divisions between political parties, and it called for politicians to work together to resolve the problems facing the United States.
Immediately following the speech, and before the response by Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, NPR had two reporters and two more partisan commentators discuss the speech. The partisan commentators immediately began the cycle of spin that has characterized politics for a long time, with each side beginning to focus on the issues that seem most relevant to their party affiliation. Then, Bobby Jindal in his response, while giving President Obama great respect, attempted to redraw the distinction between Democrats and Republicans.
I was struck, though, by how jarring the commentators' spin felt after the President's speech. Even Governor Jindal's well constructed remarks did not feel as effective as similar speeches have in the past.
The reason for this disconnect emerges from the nature of language and communication. Communication works most effectively when the people speaking make comments that align with those of the previous speaker. For example, the sentence
Mary thinks vanilla
seems like nonsense, but if the previous speaker had said,
What kind of ice cream do you think Bob likes?
then this sentence does make sense, because it aligns with what the previous speaker said. In this example, the first speaker sets up a thought about Bob and ice cream preference. The second speaker adds Mary's opinion to the discussion.
There is no question that the ease of aligning thoughts has a huge role on the effectiveness of thinking and communication. Dedre Gentner and I have done quite a bit of research on this topic in the context of comparisons. For example, it is much easier for people to list differences between things that are similar (like a hotel and a motel) than for things that are dissimilar (like a magazine and a kitten). It might seem strange that it is easier for people to find differences between similar things than it is to find differences between dissimilar things, but similar concepts (like hotels and motels) are represented in a way that makes it easy to align them, and dissimilar items are represented in a way that makes them hard to compare. It is useful to have concepts that are set up this way, because it would not be very efficient most of the time for us to be consumed by the many actual differences between magazines and kittens. Most of those differences are irrelevant most of the time. So the mind is set up to focus us on information that is likely to be useful.
What does this have to do with the speech? President Obama was quite careful to avoid discussion of partisan politics in his speech. He talked about uniting Americans to face challenges. His words put everyone-Democratic politicians, Republican politicians, and citizens-into a single group. He then envisioned this group working together to make progress against the economic forces acting against it.
Because the speech lumped all Americans together into the same group, the spin that followed the speech as well as the sharply partisan response were less effective than they have been in the past when Presidents Bush and Clinton used more partisan language. This language tried to create a division within a group that President Obama's speech had treated as a whole. So, the spin did not align well with the President's message.
Right now, President Obama has high approval ratings and Democratic majorities in Congress. As a result, he can afford to frame his speeches in an inclusive way. If the President continues to be successful at talking beyond partisan politics, then he will make it quite difficult for ideas based on share ideological splits between Democrats and Republicans to gain traction. Who knows, this language might even get politicians in Washington to work together.
