Framing the Rhetoric of a Leader

An Analysis of Obama's Election Campaign Speeches

M. Degani

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137471598
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Linguistique

Based on a selection of 30 election campaign speeches during Obama's first run for the American presidency in 2008, this book investigates the Democratic presidential candidate's much celebrated rhetoric from a cognitive semantics point of view.

1

Introduction

American presidents represent the kind of public figures who cannot escape the headlines. They fatally attract the media, generate rumors and make the entire world talk about them. Their public image is constructed piece by piece in the different phases that mark their ascendancy to the presidency, from the early stage of the pre-primary election up to the general election. This means that by the time the competition is reduced to a direct confrontation between a Democratic and a Republican frontrunner, people already know a lot about both candidates. In this last and heated phase of political contest, the words of the candidates on how they would lead the country have been repeated often enough to have found their way into people’s minds and hearts. Thus, the stage is prepared for the grand finale when the president elect is acclaimed with standing ovations.

What happened to America on 4 November 2008 was more than the election of the 44th President. The ascendancy to the American presidency of Barack Hussein Obama was taken as a sign that the time of change had finally come to America and to the world. Obama was the first African-American President and his victory was taken to mark the beginning of a new chapter in the history of America. The front pages of newspapers and magazines all over the world celebrated this historic event. The outburst of enthusiasm could not be silenced and Obama was soon made into a world celebrity.

Obama no doubt happened to be the right person at the right time. After two terms of Republican administration, the country was ready and eager to be led by a President who promised renewal. Significantly enough, Obama’s election campaign focused on change and hope. These very concepts responded to the needs and wishes of the American people, and they could be truthfully supported by Obama himself. In other words, change and hope represented what the American electorate was looking for and they depicted the Democratic candidate Obama as the right option for the ballot.

Obama was young and non-white, and he represented a powerful embodiment of the American Dream. His own personal story could tell Americans that everyone can make it, notwithstanding all odds. He was also the man of the new global era. As proved by his successful communication through new media technology, Obama was able to engage young voters and obtain their support (see McKinney and Banwart 2011). His genealogy and upbringing also gave him a very special status. Being the son of a white mother and an African father, he could be seen as reconciling the deep racial divide between Whites and Blacks in the US. At the same time, the presence of an Indonesian stepfather and the experiences he could collect from three different continents (Asia, Africa, America) facilitated drawing an image of him as the cosmopolitan citizen or, to put it differently, the universalist who cannot deny particularity. In this way, he could attract the sympathies and embrace the aspirations of many different people: ethnic groups, immigrant communities, white liberals and even radicals. In addition to this, the fact that he was raised by a single parent, his mother, and received caring affection by other female figures in his extended family, was probably appreciated by many ‘untraditional’ American families.

Besides embodying and communicating so many positive messages, Obama has been credited with very skillful use of linguistic devices throughout the 2008 election campaign. For instance, Alim and Smitherman (2012) have recently emphasized Obama’s flexibility in language usage as one typical feature of his rhetorical style during his first run for the presidency. In particular, they refer to Obama’s unusual capacity to aptly switch his mode of expression from Standard American English to African American Vernacular English, depending on the context and on the receivers of his varied oral deliveries.

Language was central to Obama’s victory. His electoral speeches, which constitute the long-lasting core of his hard-fought campaign, proved his rhetorical ability. Here, Obama’s words seemed to prove an innate disposition for crafting messages that can speak to and inspire many different Americans. Obama’s speeches also seemed to demonstrate his sensitivity for recognizing the real problems affecting people. Furthermore, they showed his pragmatic approach in making reasonable proposals to face problems effectively.

Obama’s mastery in leading discussions and mediating perspectives is a facet of his personality and subjectivity that his biographers like to emphasize. So, for instance, when discussing Obama’s experiences at Harvard Law School, Remnick (2010: 189) observes how ‘Obama attracted attention at Harvard for the confidence of his bearing and his way of absorbing and synthesizing the arguments of others in a way that made even the most strident opponent feel understood’. An additional proof of Obama’s talent for successful communication is given by his admission to the group of excellent students who were selected out of hundreds for contributing to the Harvard Law Review.

In his manifest inclination for talking publicly, Obama excels previous presidents by standing out as a virtuoso of rhetoric. This personal gift emphasizes the centrality of speechmaking for modern American presidents. Speechmaking, indeed, represents a key component of modern presidential campaigns. The art and craft of speechmaking has been an essential quality for any American politician running the presidential race from the twentieth century onwards. In a way, one could say that the modern American president has turned into a loquacious public figure by necessity (see Tulis 1987, Kernell 1993, Perloff 1998, Metcalf 2004). Irrespective of their talents, modern American presidents feel the urge to address their audience publicly and enchant them with moving and well-designed political messages. For this reason, the preparation of an electoral campaign involves the hard work of collaborators who work in teams to facilitate the job of the would-be president. They are the so-called speechwriters. Candidates establish a special relationship with their speechwriters, since the end product of the speechwriters’ work, the electoral speech, needs to echo the voice of the candidate. This is a crucial point of the whole process.

As a specific textual type, electoral speeches respond to certain needs (see Trent and Friedenbeg 2000). They typically contain information on the candidate, the election campaign, political opponents, failures of past policies, proposals for improvements and so on. Furthermore, they can be characterized by a focus on, for example, foreign or domestic affairs, depending on what is perceived as the ‘real’ political issue at that particular moment. Speeches also need to follow a general structure of presentation that prescribes, among other things, the inclusion of speech modules: sections of variable length that appear again and again during a campaign.

Given a basic textual grid to which speeches tend to conform, the interest of researchers in political communication obviously resides in the recognition of a politician’s distinctiveness. Politicians are remembered for the traits that make their rhetoric different from (or similar to) that of previous political leaders. There is indeed a tradition of rhetorical studies investigating presidential language, and this tradition is quintessentially American. A large number of scholars working in this framework have explored different facets of American presidential language. Some of these scholars were concerned with emphasizing the role of history in political speeches and the related idea of communicating continuity within change (see, for example, Smith and Smith 1994, Campbell and Jamieson 1995, Perloff 1998). Others considered aspects of meaning creation in their semantic content analyses and focused on the effects of lexical usage (see, for example, Hart 1984, 2000, Lim 2002). Still others were interested in exploring the communicative relationship between speaker and listener to account for the impact and hence effectiveness of political speeches (see, for example, Wilson 1990, Dayan and Katz 1992, Kernell 1993, Teten 2003).

Even though rhetorical studies occupy a very large portion of American scholarly interest, there are also works that look at political discourse from a different perspective. In particular, provocative suggestions on how to interpret ideological oppositions in the domain of politics were put forward by Hunter (1991). The sociologist proposed a theory about opposing views in American culture for which he coined the expression ‘culture war’. In brief, the theory refers to a values divide in US culture and explains cultural oppositions in American society in terms of people’s moral assessments of reality. Since people’s belief systems are expected to have important repercussions on their political behavior, the theory has been used primarily to study disagreements over public policy and political candidates. Influential as Hunter’s idea of a culture war in American society has been, ever since its publication in the 1990s, it has caused heated discussions among political scientists. It was received by some with skepticism and by others with enthusiasm. Notwithstanding reactions, it is a truism that Hunter’s theory has strongly influenced the understanding of American politics. This is a fact that should be kept in mind for appreciating the cultural relevance of the linguistic analyses presented in this book.

Very significantly, Hunter’s (1991) ideas about American culture and politics seem to reverberate in Lakoff’s (1996) view of American politics. With all the necessary adaptations and a good range of expansions, Lakoff appears to interpret and translate an influential socio-cultural theory into a promising linguistic framework.

In Lakoff’s view, what makes conservatives different from progressives is a distinctive way of thinking about politics that is based on two specific family-based moral systems. Reasoning from a cognitive linguistic perspective, Lakoff assumes that the people’s choice to side with either Republicans or Democrats is based on the existence of two different idealized cognitive models: the Strict Father (SF) and the Nurturant Parent (NP). While the SF model is in line with Republican ideology, the NP one is coherent with a Democratic understanding of reality. Each of the two models explains a specific worldview where certain moral values have priority over others. Thus, for instance, authority plays a key role in the SF morality model, whereas nurturance is central to NP morality.

In various publications, Lakoff (1996, 2004, 2006, 2008) also claimed that the models underlie American right-wing versus left-wing political rhetoric. In other words, the models provide the grounding for how politicians discuss matters or, to put it more technically, for how politicians frame political issues. Thus, Republican political leaders are expected to talk in line with SF morality, whereas Democratic politicians are envisaged to express their ideas according to a NP worldview.

Having said this, doubts still remain on the actual applicability of Lakoff’s suggestions. His hypotheses are very stimulating and they have potential to shed light on politicians’ use of language as well as on the effects of their words on prospective supporters. However, Lakoff did not couple his hypotheses with any empirical data. Furthermore, the very small amount of research that tried to apply the SF and NP models to the analysis of American political language (Cienki 2004, 2005a, 2005b, Ahrens 2006, 2011, Ahrens and Yat Mei Lee 2009) could not provide any clear support for their validity. This paucity of results calls for further investigations.

The challenge of putting Lakoff’s hypotheses further to the test is taken up in this book. In light of Obama’s great success during the 2008 election campaign, the question arises of whether he conformed to Lakoff’s prediction about Democratic politicians and their supposed NP framing of issues. To explore this question, Obama’s electoral speeches are taken as the testing ground for empirically proving, or disproving, the validity of Lakoff’s models.

Given the importance of working with a coherent and representative pool of data, a corpus was created that gathers speeches during the whole period of Obama’s first election campaign for the American presidency. The corpus brings together Obama’s much acclaimed primary night speeches as well as a good range of other speeches in which he tackles issues that have relevance for his political message to the American electorate.

Testing Lakoff’s models is not an easy task. The complexity of the models invites a book-length investigation that can test their validity from different angles. The study presented in this book intends to propose a new way of applying the models that is based on different levels of linguistic analysis. In this sense, the book is also aimed at shedding new light on the potential usefulness of Lakoff’s models for understanding American political discourse. Indeed, a thorough analysis of Obama’s speeches in terms of Lakoff’s models demands a combined quantitative and qualitative approach, which is based on close reading and contextual analysis.

When applying Lakoff’s models, it is first of all important to stress that moral values are at the core of the models. Thus, moral values are the starting point of the analysis presented in this book. Since it is values which define the opposing SF and NP morality models, they need to be searched for in a corpus of political language. Values motivate not just the selection of issues to be discussed during an election campaign, but, most importantly, determine how a politician frames his or her discourse. Accordingly, the first step in the linguistic analysis that is shown here consists in the identification and classification of individual values addressed by Obama in his electoral speeches.

Clearly enough, values do not exist in a vacuum. On the contrary, during an election campaign, values can be woven into the fabric of an elaborate narrative. Obama’s electoral narrative is at the same time personal, social and historical. In his speeches, he talks about himself and his family, he refers to the American people and he celebrates America as a great nation and a beacon of light for all of humanity. The political values addressed by Obama need to be understood against this general background. They occupy a specific role and a defined textual space within the larger whole of his political and moral message to the American electorate.

His values also take part in the architecture of a discourse that is finely assembled for the purpose of reaching and conquering a large audience. For this reason, the analysis is not limited to identifying and classifying the values expressed in his speeches. In addition to that, it also considers the range of rhetorical strategies on which Obama relied for a successful communication of values. The book provides details on the amplitude of values that Obama expressed in his electoral speeches and on the strategies that he employed to give voice to the values in the context of his electoral narrative.

One of the central questions of how Obama uses language to frame his values is whether he relies on metaphors to reach that aim. The use of metaphors in political discourse has a long tradition in research, particularly from the perspective of cognitive linguistics (see Chilton 1996, Musolff 2000a, 2000b, 2003, 2004, Beer and De Landtsheer 2004, Charteris-Black 2004, 2005, 2006, 2013, Carver and Pikalo 2008). Metaphors are also central to Lakoff’s family-based models, and this has actually led to interpretations that put the underlying values as second to metaphors. It is thus a further aim of the book to focus on the actual role of metaphorical expressions and their relation to values in Obama’s speeches. This empirical quest for metaphors sheds new light on a previously assumed direct relation between metaphors and Lakoff’s models.

Closely related to a contextual analysis of values and metaphors is an investigation of lexical choices. Thus, the book also deals with highly frequent words in Obama’s speeches. In detail, looking at the usage of the most prominent words in context serves as an additional test for checking Obama’s framing of issues. The lexical analysis is prompted by two major objectives. On the one hand, it is important to find out which lexical items are the most signifying ‘carriers’ of Obama’s electoral message. On the other hand, it is crucial to check whether or not links can be established between the expression of a moral worldview and the use of specific lexical items that can, in principle, be associated to Lakoff’s models. The results of this exploration highlight that Obama’s lexical preferences can be seen as indicative of the (moral) reality he constructs in his speeches.

Overall, this book illuminates the role of Lakoff’s SF and NP models for understanding and analyzing political language. Moreover, the particular application of Lakoff’s models presented in this work offers a novel way of approaching the complex relation between political language and cognition.

2

Political Discourse in the US

All life therefore comes back to the question of our speech, the medium through which we communicate with each other; for all life comes back to the question of our relations with one another. These relations […] are verily constituted, by our speech. […] The more it suggests and expresses the more we live by it […]. (Henry James, The Question of Our Speech, 1998: 44)

While the primary objective of this book remains the presentation of a new way for testing the applicability of Lakoff’s models to the analysis of Obama’s election campaign speeches, it is important, first of all, to explore the larger context of previous research on American political discourse. Accordingly, this chapter offers a comprehensive overview of the major concerns and areas of research that have attracted American scholars with an interest in political discourse. In particular, the chapter highlights the significance of speech-making, drawing on major approaches in the field of rhetoric, the role of speechwriters and the function of speeches as a form of communication that is characteristic of election campaigns.

Throughout the discussion, these issues are illustrated with examples from Obama’s 2008 election campaign speeches, alluding to the fact that an analysis that is in line with the American tradition of rhetorical studies can yield further interesting insights. In addition, the chapter introduces Hunter’s notion of a cultural divide between orthodox and progressive people in the US and suggests a striking similarity to how Lakoff constructs his models of political morality. This aspect is of great importance for the book since it grounds the linguistic investigation in a broader cultural dimension.

2.1 Political discourse and rhetoric: from classical oratory to contemporary speech-making

Political discourse is such a vast area of enquiry that any attempt at exhaustively describing its multiple components and making them fit into a coherent whole is very likely to undermine even the stamina of the most zealous scholar. Driven by a wide range of different and diverging reasons, political philosophers, political and social scientists, discourse analysts, experts in communication and linguists of various beliefs have made the relation between language and politics the subject matter of their investigations. As a result, an immense number of books and articles dealing with political language, discourse and communication (the terms are often used interchangeably) have been published and are currently available to the avid reader.

In line with the field of rhetoric, which goes back to the time of the Sophists and Aristotle, political discourse has often been studied in t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Political Discourse in the US
• 3 Cognition and Politics
• 4 Methodology and Introduction to the Analysis
• 5 The Expression of Values in Obama’s Speeches
• 6 Values and Metaphors in Obama’s Speeches
• 7 Values and Lexical Preferences in Obama’s Speeches
• 8 Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Metaphorical Expressions in Value-laden Paragraphs
• Appendix 2: Frequency of Metaphorical Expressions in Value-laden Paragraphs
• Appendix 3: Highly Frequent Words in the Corpus
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index