Obama on the Stump: Features and Determinants of a Rhetorical Approach

{W}ords are important, words matter, and the implication that they don't, I think, diminishes how important it is to speak to the American people directly about making America as good as its promise. --Barack Obama, February 21, 2008 Words have always mattered for Barack Obama. From the moment he appeared on the national political scene in 2004, his formidable rhetorical skills have been a central component of his public persona and his political success. Indeed, it was a speech that transformed Obama from a little-known state senator into a nationally known political celebrity. In July 2004, Obama delivered his now-famous keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. He spoke of a nation that was divided along partisan lines and a political establishment that was broken. He also spoke of the hope that such problems could be overcome if the American people would come together and demand change. These rhetorical appeals recurred regularly over the next few years as Obama, by then the junior U.S. senator from Illinois, continued his rapid political ascendance. During the 2006 midterm elections, Obama was the speaker most coveted by campaigning Democrats (Abramson, Aldrich, and Rohde 2007), and by February 2007, he was aiming for America's highest office. Once more, words were essential. In a dramatic speech at the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois, Obama announced his candidacy for president of the United States. He again spoke of hope and change, of unity in the face of partisanship, but also of improving schools and health care and the economy. He concluded by quoting Abraham Lincoln and urging the crowd of thousands to action: "Together we can finish the work that needs to be done, and usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth." Given the importance of public address to Obama's political life, it is not surprising that a growing body of scholarship has examined his rhetorical techniques (e.g., Atwater 2007; Elahi and Cos 2005; Frank 2009; Frank and McPhail 2005; Murphy 2009; Rowland and Jones 2007; Smith 2009). What is surprising, however, is that almost none of this scholarship has considered multiple speeches to explore the general patterns that exist in Obama's rhetoric. Rather, the extant literature consists almost entirely of qualitative analyses of single speeches, making it difficult to generalize about the broader features of Obama's rhetorical approach and impossible to understand the determinants of his rhetorical choices. Gaining further insight into the nature of Obama's rhetorical approach in the 2008 campaign is necessary because presidential campaign rhetoric can have important consequences. It is one of several factors that shape the media and public agenda during campaigns (Abramson, Aldrich, and Rohde 2007) and, historically, choosing certain rhetorical themes over others has influenced the likelihood that a given candidate will win the presidency (Benoit 2003). Further, the campaign rhetoric of winning presidential candidates matters once they take office. As Quirk and Matheson point out, such rhetoric "creates commitments that carry weight after the election" (2005, 133), expanding or limiting the ability of presidents to govern effectively. With this in mind, this study fills a void in the literature by systematically tracking Obama's rhetoric over the course of the 2008 presidential campaign and considering multiple explanations for the variation that occurs during this period. Using a unique computer-assisted content analysis procedure that draws coding categories directly from the more than 11,500 distinct words that Obama used during his campaign, we analyze 183 speeches and debates from his announcement of candidacy in February 2007 to his victory speech in November 2008. Our analysis proceeds as follows. We first review the existing literature on Obama's rhetoric to highlight the need for a broad, systematic study of Obama's rhetorical appeals and to begin to identify common themes in Obama's speeches that will form the foundation for the content analysis. …