Rhetorical Democracy: An Examination of the Presidential Inaugural Addresses

Despite the fact that there is nothing in the Constitution requiring it, nor prescribed by any other federal law, the President\u27s delivery of an inaugural address has become a de facto requirement of the official Presidential inauguration. The Presidential inaugural address is an anticipated feature of all inaugural ceremonies because it is where the newly elected president outlines, among other things, his perspective on the manner, conduct and overall form of the American government. Within this outline, the rhetoric utilized by the President during inaugural addresses shapes the way in which the American people understand our system of government on both a theoretical and functional level. This research examines the utilization of the term “democracy” in presidential inaugural speeches as a rhetorical device and the impacts of this terminology upon conceptions of American governance. This rhetorical analysis provides a lens to view the changing dynamics of American political thought

Beware of Historians Bearing False Analogies

A response to the book "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" by Paul Kennedy (1987).IC2 Institut

A Style of His Own: A Rhetorical Analysis of President Barack Obama\u27s Inaugural Addresses

This paper analyzes President Obama’s rhetoric in his two inaugural addresses in order to determine how his presidential rhetoric conforms and violates current rhetorical traditions in inaugural addresses. For this paper a rhetorical analysis of Obama’s addresses was performed using a form of genre criticism. The components for this genre criticism were drawn from Vanessa B. Beasley’s work on presidential rhetoric in her book You, the People: American National Identity in Presidential Rhetoric. Results of this analysis will showed that President Obama’s presidential rhetoric is more secular than previous presidents and focuses more on shared American ideals. The results also illustrate that President Obama’s rhetoric is different in that he portrays immigration in a much more positive light, and portrays racial issues from a perspective that he never been possible for previous presidents. The author\u27s entry essay for the 2014 Undergraduate Research Awards is included

A Style of His Own: A Rhetorical Analysis of Barack Obama

This paper analyzes President Obama’s rhetoric in his two inaugural addresses in order to determine how his presidential rhetoric conforms to and violates current rhetorical traditions in inaugural addresses. For this paper a rhetorical analysis of Obama’s addresses was performed using a form of genre criticism. The components for this genre criticism were drawn from Vanessa B. Beasley’s work on presidential rhetoric in her book You, the People: American National Identity in Presidential Rhetoric. Anticipated results of this analysis will show that President Obama’s presidential rhetoric is more secular than previous presidents. The results will also illustrate that President Obama’s rhetoric is different in that he addresses immigration and racial issues from a perspective that has never been possible for previous presidents

Americanization now and then: the 'nation of immigrants' in the early twentieth and twenty-first centuries

In an analysis of contemporary attempts at US immigration reform in the context of its legal history (especially John F. Kennedy's 1964 Immigration and Nationality Act) this article explores a fundamental paradox in American political thought and practice as regards immigration. It examines the tension between the US's insistence, on one hand, upon immigrants' swift and wholesale integration into American life (as exemplified in the early 20th C Americanization programme, echoed in a 2007 call for a renewed Americanization initiative under President George W. Bush) and its self- definition as a proud 'nation of immigrants' on the other. In so doing, the essay critiques the 'nation of immigrants' shibboleth for its implicit racist bias and introduces the concept of 'ethnic shame,' prevalent for most of the 20th C, to complement today's much more familiar (but also much more recent) notion of Americans' ethnic pride in their immigrant roots. The article concludes that the ostensible paradox of a 'nation of immigrants' insisting on Americanization is best understood within the framework of what is theorised here for the first time as the 'gratitude paradigm,' which governs the granting and the possession of American citizenship to immigrants not just of the first, but of many generations thereafter

Manifest Destiny Adapted for 1990s’ War Discourse: Mission and Destiny Intertwined

Civil religious themes have long been integral to public discourse in America. Specifically the themes of mission and destiny best known in the farm of Manifest Destiny, still carry the country through periods of foreign conflict. This paper analyzes the discourses of President George Bush during the Persian Gulf War and President Bill Clinton during the Kosovo conflict. I identify the themes of mission by example and mission by intervention and argue that these forms of mission are intertwined. The use of these themes by presidents of different political parties indicates that while they remain useful, they are adapting for a changing political and economic world system

From the Hood to the White House: The Cultural Imaginary of Presidential Blackness in Head of State

This article analyzes the film Head of State’s cultural imaginary of presidential blackness that signifies national progress while sublimating social conflict. The plot imagines a black man from the hood successfully running for presidency, living the American dream, and becoming an unconventional national icon. His symbolic blackness comprises two markers of difference: his identification with the disenfranchised hood and the black diaspora. As he challenges racial inequality in the U.S. as well as moral corruption among the élite, he unifies one historical fiction of America. I focus on how the film attributes an anti-establishment legacy to a minority president based on his countercultural identity performances although he remains complicit with foundational institutions of government. While the film projects hopes for future racial and economic equality upon a fictional black president and strategically redefines the American dream, I argue that it appropriates and revives American exceptionalist myths

Destabilized Artistry in the Rhetorical Presidency

The presidency was once a carefully scripted and carefully controlled site of speech production. Today’s media environment has not lessened efforts at control, but it has rendered these efforts increasingly difficult. Previously disruptive and disfluent ways of speaking now serve a useful role in presidential address, allowing mass-mediated audiences to apprehend the presidency in ways that appear to be more intimate and more authentic than careful scripting allows. In response to this new and fast-evolving rhetorical landscape, this essay develops an analytically, historically, and conceptually wide-ranging argument, inviting rhetorical scholars to supplement their abiding interest in traditional forms of presidential eloquence with a commitment to the study of presidential disfluency. Awkward pauses, verbal hiccups, botched colloquialisms, confessionals, and overly personalized speech all transgress the norms and expectations of presidential eloquence, allowing scholars to reflect on the longstanding, rhetorical discrepancy between presidential speech as it appears in the official historical record and presidential speech as mass-mediated audiences actually hear it