Do I detect a hint of Coolidge? Every allusion in Obama's second inaugural (interactive)

Chris Wilson
Yahoo! News

By Chris Wilson

President Barack Obama is a highly literary orator. His prepared remarks often mimic the lofty prose of Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt, among many others, sometimes explicitly and sometimes with a few choice phrases that only seasoned pols would recognize.

Early in his second inaugural address, for example, Obama said this:


One needn’t reach too far to see a clear echo in that line to the final clause of Kennedy’s inaugural:


Four lines later, Obama offers this history lesson:


Which is, without question, a nod to Lincoln’s famous second inaugural (as well as to Lincoln's "House Divided" speech):


(Before his first inauguration, Obama reportedly took his family to the Lincoln Memorial, where he might have noticed that line inscribed in stone.)

Obama's affinity for Lincoln is well-documented. More surprising is the echo between this line from Monday's speech:


And this one:


The latter was uttered in 2001 by President George W. Bush, the man Obama unofficially campaigned against in 2008.

The dustiest political science professor could not identify every allusion in a speech, made consciously or through the long seep of phraseology from one president to another. To round up the stragglers, I wrote a program to compare each sentence of Obama’s second inaugural to every sentence in every previous inaugural address. While the president surely draws inspiration from a wider body of sources, this was a good place to start.

In the following interactive, you can click any line to see matching phrases from past inaugurals.

This is not a triumph of artificial intelligence. Linguists and computer scientists have developed a range of strategies for measuring the similarity between sentences, going so far as to compare the synonyms for all nouns and all verbs in a sentence--a strategy some search engines employ to find relevant web pages for a query. For now, my strategy relies on a crude "bag of words" approach, which matches sentences based on the similarity of words, weighted to uncommon words. This is why you'll see some matches that only vaguely resemble one another. While I’ll be continuing to refine the code on future texts, for this first attempt it’s pretty literal. But how else will you uncover the affinity between Barack Obama and James Polk?