Infographic: Breaking down the State of the Union

at 11:35 AM ET, 01/25/2012


(Wilson Andrews, Laura Stanton, Karen Yourish - The Washington Post)
Our design staff built a pretty cool interactive graphic that breaks down each of President Obama’s State of the Union addresses by issue area. You can see a preview above, and play around with the full graphic here, which lets you parse each speech by issues, time allocated and even number of standing ovations.

This year, Obama hit a new record for time spent talking about the economy: At 30 minutes, that subject clocked in at about half the speech. He also hit a record low on discussion of the deficit, with 5 minutes allocated to the issue. Perhaps surprisingly, he managed to get three standing ovations, from both parties, in the 5 1/2 minutes he spent on partisanship.

Any interesting observations you find, leave them in comments.

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