Rhetorical strategies used by Obama in his campaign speeches 2012

ABSTRACT

Rhetorical strategy relates to the way how people build an effective persuasion to influence and convince the people. Every day, people have dozens of interactions where they need to influence others. They need an effective way to convey their arguments. Therefore, rhetorical strategy takes place to discover effective strategies and tactics to influence other people so that the goals can be realized. This thesis attempts to explain the research problems of how Barack Obama, as the President candidate of America, uses the rhetorical strategies on his campaign speeches in 2012. The researcher uses canon of rhetoric proposed by Marcus Cicero and rhetorical situation proposed by Lloyd Bitzer to answer the problems. This study aims at investigating the rhetorical strategies used by Barack Obama on his campaign speeches in 2012.

In this study, the researcher uses descriptive qualitative method. The data are taken from the utterances and nonverbal behaviors on Barack Obama’s speech at campaign event 2012 which is related to the rhetorical situation and strategy. Then, the researcher analyzes the data and also discusses by using employed theory.

The findings show that Barack Obama applies both theories proposed by Cicero and Bitzer. Based on Bitzer’s theory, the speaker applies rhetorical situation including exigence, audience and constraint. Following Cicero’s theory, Barack Obama employs canon of rhetoric. He exercises contrast, antecedent and consequence and compare to construct his arguments. He uses clear and good grammatical language to convey the speech. In addition, he applies anaphora to make the speech more interesting. Moreover, the speaker strongly masters the canon of delivery. He uses his body language, hand gesture and tone variety well to make his speech more powerful and emotional.

Based on the findings, the researcher suggests the next researchers who are interested in doing the research in the same particular area to have more references on the theory that encourages the analysis and to focus more on the one of canon of rhetoric. For instance, if you focus on the canon of arrangement, you can uses the theory of compositing argument and if you focus on the canon of style you can uses the theory of lexical choice on the rhetoric. Moreover, the following researcher can also employ modern rhetoric theory which may able to give different and better result, such as, C. H. Knoblauch’s theory (1985).