The presidential pronoun

In a current discussion at WriterL about writing in the first person, one member suggests that you avoid "I" alright, but still allow yourself to use "me". If you follow this rule of thumb you avoid placing yourself at the very beginning of your articles and sentences and avoid looking blatantly self-centered. This is a fine piece of advice, comparable with the old and quite challenging convention of never opening a personal letter by saying: I...

Still, of course, your rhetoric may well be centered completely on yourself and address your personal supporters exclusively, if only perhaps in more of an elegant manner. Mind the following analysis. It is Joe Klein at Time who takes a look at Barack Obama's use of personal pronouns, and I quote at length:

"We are the ones we've been waiting for," Barack Obama said in yet another memorable election-night speech on Super-Confusing Tuesday. "We are the change that we seek." Waiting to hear what Obama has to say — win, lose or tie — has become the most anticipated event of any given primary night. The man's use of pronouns (never I), of inspirational language and of poetic meter — "WE are the CHANGE that we SEEK" — is unprecedented in recent memory. Yes, Ronald Reagan could give great set-piece speeches on grand occasions, and so could John F. Kennedy, but Obama's ability to toss one off, different each week, is simply breathtaking. His New Hampshire concession speech, with the refrain "Yes, We Can," was turned into a brilliant music video featuring an array of young, hip, talented and beautiful celebrities. The video, stark in black-and-white, raised an existential question for Democrats: How can you not be moved by this? How can you vote against the future?

And yet there was something just a wee bit creepy about the mass messianism — "We are the ones we've been waiting for" — of the Super Tuesday speech and the recent turn of the Obama campaign. "This time can be different because this campaign for the presidency of the United States of America is different. It's different not because of me. It's different because of you." That is not just maddeningly vague but also disingenuous: the campaign is entirely about Obama and his ability to inspire. Rather than focusing on any specific issue or cause — other than an amorphous desire for change — the message is becoming dangerously self-referential. The Obama campaign all too often is about how wonderful the Obama campaign is.

Read the rest of the article at http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1710721,00.html.

The overall strategy described here seems somehow related to the step-by-step introduction of self - first "they", then "we", then "me" and then, finally, "I" - that I have been pointing out in Lisbeth Davidsen and Åsne Seierstad's reporting. In this political context it might work well as a buildup of expectations to the elections; an approach based on pure formal identification (in Kenneth Burke's sense) on a macro (campaign) level:

Use "you", "we" and the occasional "me" on the campaign trail, but keep your "I" on hold until you're finally in a position to say: "I, the president of the United States..." Voters may swing along with the verbal gradation and decide to help their candidate release the ultimate personal pronoun.