Obama's 1st State of the Union

The 2010 State of the Union Address was given by United States President Barack Obama on January 27, 2010, to a joint session of Congress. It was aired on all the major networks starting at 9 PM ET. It was Obama's first State of the Union Address.

The speech was delivered on the floor of the United States House of Representatives in the United States Capitol. Among the topics that Obama covered in his speech were proposals for job creation and federal deficit reduction.

This is another in a series of major public speechs by Obama, beginning during the campaign. They have generally correlated with substantial deviations, and while this speech was given after a year of less than great news, it does show a small positive deviation (twice as large as the GCP composite average effect size.)

The GCP event was set for 9:00 pm ET to 11:00, and the speech started at about 9:15 (marked in the figure below). The outcome is 7296.7 on 7200 df, for p = 0.210 and Z = 0.808.

Obama's 1st State
of the Union

It is important to keep in mind that we have only a tiny statistical effect, so that it is always hard to distinguish signal from noise. This means that every "success" might be largely driven by chance, and every "null" might include a real signal overwhelmed by noise. In the long run, a real effect can be identified only by patiently accumulating replications of similar analyses.


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