Suspending disbelief: The role of emotions in political communication (original) (raw)
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The 2008 Obama Presidential campaign will likely become one of the most discussed, debated and analyzed political campaigns this century. It was a fascinating spectacle and provides much food for academic thought. For our purposes, the campaign provides a context for testing a template for interpreting political activity. This essay will attempt first to describe this template and its core assumptions. This will require the political scientist's patience since it draws on models beyond the boundaries of the discipline conventionally conceived. Second, we shall illustrate our understandings at work in the Obama campaign.
In 2004, the American nation was introduced to the formidable rhetorical skills of the then Senator Obama with his delivery of the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention. The skills on display then have only grown and developed throughout the years leading to his successful presidential campaign of 2008. This paper addresses the various rhetorical devices that Obama uses so expertly: The use of personal narrative, repetition, metaphors, clichés, questions, opposites and so on. It is the various combinations of these devices that make reading or hearing an Obama speech such a rhetorical pleasure.
The Polyphonic Orchestration of Barack Obama, 2004 to 2012: The Evolving Strategic Campaign Message
Obama's ceremonial (i.e. convention speeches and inaugurals) discourse from 2004 to 2012 constitutes an evolving polyphony. The voices of the polyphony shift from offering the Biblically-rich, personal story of Obama as an African-American to the rather partisan story of Obama as a public policy leader. Obama remains the hero in the story the polyphony presents; however, the opposition shifts from being those who doubt the dream to those who oppose policy initiatives. The voices sustain Obama's inspiring story throughout the discourse; however, the personal fades and is replaced by an emphasis on the people he is trying to serve, the policies he is advocating on their behalf, and the partisan turmoil those policies have become entangled in. Grounded in the theoretical work of Mikhail Bakhtin, the account treats Obama's discourse as a non-finalizable orchestration of voices. Increasingly, political figures are more stories than a set of policy proposals or principles. The shift may be due to three converging trends: one, media coverage that is more narrative or dramatic than straightforwardly factual; two, our cultural immersion in story in a media environment dominated by television, film, and the many mininar-ratives available through the Internet; three, media coverage of political figures,
Quarterly Journal of Speech, 2018
We argue that one important role of the contemporary president is to be a conductor of public feelings. To demonstrate, we analyze U.S. President Barack Obama’s national eulogy speech delivered on January 12, 2011 in Tucson, Arizona. We show how Obama acts as a musical or energy conductor, redirecting a soundscape of boisterous enthusiasm to be in concert with discordant feelings of national pain and anger and moving them toward social love that is non-partisan and at times civic-centered. This essay has implications for public policy, racial registers of feeling, and writing the bodies of rhetorical scholars into criticism.
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Perspectives, 2010
In [. . .] The Performance of Power, I examine the strategies and statements of those who planned, directed, and fought the 2008 Presidential campaign. While I pay close attention to the broader contexts that defined its social backdrop, I also enmesh myself in the day to day reports of print, television, and digital media, not simply to find out factual details but to gain access to the symbolic flows that are the actual determinates of victory and defeat. Meaningful texture dictates political power. What decides campaigns are the cultural frameworks that candidates lay down and work through and that journalists not only referee but help create. I investigate this textually mediated back and forth between Barack Obama and John McCain from June to November of 2008.
Die Emotionalisierung des Politischen, 2021
This is the galley proof of part 1 of my 3 part PhD dissertation. It is published in an edited volume with Transcript Verlag. Page numbers may vary to the finished publication. To support the author(s), you can find the book digitally or as a hardcover under: https://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-5278-9/die-emotionalisierung-des-politischen/ -- To the surprise of many and despite Hillary R. Clinton being the clear favorite to win the 2016 U.S. election, Donald J. Trump won the race for the Republican party. Trump’s campaign was defined by “nationalistic” and “populist” narratives, following a strategy of political marketing which was designed to emotionalize the political discourse, in a quality usually reserved for autocratic regimes (cf. Gillies 2018: 2). In this partsociological, part-media communication and partneuroscientific study I will be focusing on each candidate’s argumentative structure as well as their employment of three key emotional stimuli (sex, fear and violence) throughout their public speeches, interviews and debates. The method applied will be a qualitative discourse analysis based on the Pragmatic Sociology of Critique (PSC) according to Boltanski and Thévenot and will be further developed into a critical media analysis method, serving as a flexible framework for analyzing emotionalized political media content. By sociologically examining the occurrence of these key emotional stimuli in combination with (political) arguments, the study is introducing established neuroscientific theories (regarding the role of emotions within human attention- and memoryprocesses) into the realm of media and communication research. I strive to identify each campaign’s distinctive argumentative pattern as well as to highlight the importance of emotional stimuli within (political) communication and especially populism. The general goal of the paper will be to develop and introduce a neopragmatist method for media research using the example of the 2016 U.S. electoral communication. Additionally, the differences between ‘populist’ and ‘regular’ communication shall be discussed.