The 'We' in "Yes We Can..."

Though now it feels like ancient history, America’s fixation on Barack Obama’s candidacy and its concomitant messages of “hope” and “change” is still the most contemporaneous and richly representative example of the complicated and isochronous, though loosely documented, rhetorical transactions between political rhetors and audiences. By mapping the ethotic relationship between rhetors and their audiences, and theorizing how that relationship endures over time, I argue that we can expand our understanding and usage of ethos in the political sphere, and, by extrapolating and reapplying what we learn there, to the pedagogical, and, to a lesser extent, literary spheres as well.

For instance, twenty thousand people waited on the shores of Lady Bird Lake in Austin, Texas for nearly three hours on a cold and rainy Friday in February 2007 to hear the newly announced presidential candidate speak to them (transcript; video). Again: twenty thousand people showed up in the rain on a Friday—twelve months before the party primaries, and eighteen long months before the general election—to hear a man who, though an official candidate for less than two weeks, was already being dubbed a presumptive frontrunner for the 2008 Democratic nomination for president, a presumption that has since proven accurate.

Though this scene has since been replicated hundreds of times, even Obama seemed surprised by the turnout in Austin that Friday: “Unbelievable,” he repeated absently into the microphone as he mounted the stage, adding “I have not seen a crowd like this. I am overwhelmed, Austin.” And then:

On February tenth, two Saturdays ago I stood in front of the old state capitol in Springfield, Illinois, a place where Abraham Lincoln has served and where he delivered his famous speech in which he said that a nation divided against itself could not stand. And he was an inspiration for all of us, but for me to be there and see seventeen thousand people in seven-degree weather was truly an inspiration, and it told me not that people were simply supporting my campaign, but it told me that people were ready for a change. That it wasn't just about me. And it was a humbling experience…

What followed is approximately fifty minutes of typical early election cycle panegyric, focusing on Obama’s particular ideology, his now famous “audacity of hope,” whereby hope is not “to ignore the problems in the world [in order] to be hopeful,” but is “to believe that the world as it is is not the world as it has to be:”

So I walk into the church, Trinity United Church of Christ, and the pastor there is a guy named Jeremiah Wright. And Dr. Wright was delivering a sermon titled the audacity of hope. And his basic idea was very simple. What he said was this. He said the easiest thing in the world is to be cynical. Nothing is easier than to say that the world is what it is, to watch the television and read the newspapers and see poverty, and strife, and violence, and war, famine, and to say there is nothing we can do about it.

That the best we can hope for is to protect ourselves and our families, to look after ourselves, to abandon the public life to those who are cynical, the special interests, the lobbyists, the people who will wield power only for their own benefit. What’s hard, what’s difficult, what’s bold, what requires risk, what’s audacious, is to hope.

It’s to believe that the world as it is is not the world as it has to be.

That we can close the gap between those two worlds if we apply hard work, and imagination, and diligence, and if we work together.

And I was inspired by that sermon, not only because I thought that it applied to my life, because it told me that you don't have to ignore the problems in the world to be hopeful. You simply have to be committed to bringing about change and doing everything you can to imagine a better world. But I was also inspired because I realized that the idea described the very essence of

America, that America at every stage always had the audacity to hope.

You think about it…*

Applause for Obama’s speech was approbatory and robust. But what, exactly, where those twenty thousand people applauding? Certainly one answer is that Obama was in for an even more humbling experience than he realized, since, like it our not, and despite his protestations, the audience’s enthusiasm is for him, and the campaign is about him. Those twenty thousand people were primed by prior knowledge to like Barack Obama, even without knowing his specific policy positions on key issues. First, there was his national coming out at the 2004 Democratic National Convention where, in his stump speech for John Kerry, he first introduced his doctrine of hope: “Hope — Hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope!” Then there were the releases of his two bestselling memoirs within half a year of each other, The Audacity of Hope in October 2006, and Dreams of My Father republished in January 2007 (originally published in 1995). There were promotional appearances on Oprah and The Today Show, and in the November 2004 issue of O Magazine, where he is labeled “someone [Oprah] wants you to get to know.” Major newspapers also helped people better know Obama through increasingly extensive coverage: between 1990 and 2003 Obama appears in the New York Times five times, four times in the Washington Post; between his first U.S. Senate bid in 2004 and the end of 2006, those numbers jump to approximately ninety-five appearances in both the Times and the Post. And between January and June 2007, they rocket again to 227 and 177 respectively. Since then, they have become too ubiquitous to count.

The expanding aggrandizement of media attention created, unsurprisingly, a potential energy that the Obama campaign, also unsurprisingly, hoped to channel with the February 2007 announcement of his candidacy. But Obama is not a cult of personality, at least not in the strictest sense where an individual deliberately consolidates power over a mass through the employment of a provocative and charismatic authority. Instead, the authority for harnessing the potential energy of prior knowledge rests with Obama’s audiences, who not only self-selected their connection with the candidate, but also, because of the perceptions generated from that prior knowledge, forcefully place Obama the man in a position central to the communicative transaction between them and him. Regardless of his desire that the presence of the large and excitable audience “wasn’t just about me,” the audience makes their presence “about” Obama; they place his textual intentions—wasn’t about me—into non-textual contexts informed by their prior experience and knowledge. This is a man, many might say to themselves, who Oprah wants me to get to know.

But it’s not as if Obama and his campaign team are totally without agency in this transaction. Despite his attempt to detach the movement from the man, as he does in his introduction when he claims that people’s readiness for change “wasn’t just about me,” Obama simultaneously embeds himself centrally, and in rarified presidential company, when he speaks of standing “in front of the old state capitol in Springfield, Illinois, a place where Abraham Lincoln has served and where he delivered his famous speech in which he said that a nation divided against itself could not stand.” Similarly, when he relates his response to Wright’s sermon on the “audacity of hope,” Obama’s intermixture of pronouns suggests a messenger more thoroughly involved in the message than simply serving as its conduit. “[W]e can close the gap between those two worlds if we apply hard work, and imagination, and diligence, and if we work together,” he stumps, suggesting what Kenneth Burke, in his Rhetoric of Motives, might consider a “consubstantial” request for “acting-together” (20-23). But Obama quickly returns to the first-person narrative that initiated the request: “I was inspired by that sermon, not only because I thought that it applied to my life, because it told me…,” and here we see another switch, this time to the second-person plural, “…that you don't have to ignore the problems in the world to be hopeful. You simply have to be committed to bringing about change and doing everything you can to imagine a better world” (emphases added). The switch is interesting because it emblematizes grammatically the realization Obama must have had, even intuitively, about his candidacy: that all campaigns—indeed, all political actions—ultimately come down to the candidate and the candidate’s ethos.

Ethos here is understood as any form of what Marshall Alcorn, in his essay "Self-Structure as a Rhetorical Device," calls “self-structuring” by the rhetor. Ethos, then, is defined by conventional Aristotelian devices, i.e., arête, eunoia, phronesis, that constitute what “may almost be called the most effective means for persuasion [a person] possesses” (W. Rhys Roberts, trans., Rhetoric, 1356a). And it is also defined by what Burke describes as the rhetor’s ability to “persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his” (55). The “just” in Obama’s “wasn’t just about me,” then, is a not insignificant admission of Obama’s ethotic involvement. That said, the prior knowledge of those twenty thousand Austinites (and the twenty thousand people in the next city, and the next, all the way to his nomination) is also not insignificant, because, in many substantial ways, audiences are as involved in the construction of rhetors’s ethos as rhetors themselves.

Acting-together is admirable, and, as we will see, crucial to the self-conception of the Obama candidacy, but we need to admit that most politically exigent transactions are about acting out other people’s desires and demands: either voters acting out the desires of candidates through grassroots campaigning and casting ballots in their favor, or now-elected representatives acting out the desires of voters by crafting and enacting particularly beneficial policies. Obama’s speech in Austin in early 2007 is, of course, an example of the former, and the passages quoted above emblematize Obama’s, again, perhaps intuitive, construction of his own ethos, especially if we accept a standardized textbook definition of ethos that assumes the rhetor’s premeditated insertion of either her or his character into the rhetorical act before its public enactment.

What is less clear, I will argue, are the cognitive motivations and social mechanisms underwriting the interplay between the construction by, and of, the candidate and the perception, reception, and perpetuation of that construction by the electorate. Obama’s inspiration in the wake of the Wright sermon he summarizes leads to what we might consider his personal perspicuity about the obligations of civically literate (to crib a phrase from the outstanding Donald Lazere) and politically engaged Americans, i.e., commit to change, imagine a better world, and, finally, engage in grassroots action, including the most revolutionary aspect of his campaign, millions of micro-donations from thousands of individual supporters.

He immediately extends his insight beyond the individual: “But I was also inspired because I realized that the idea described the very essence of America; that America at every stage always had the audacity to hope.” Here is personal perspicuity’s view of the individual citizen enlarged to the level of totalized national history and political ideology: an appropriately prodigious and positive weltanschauung for a presidential candidate, considering all presidential candidates must have weltanschauungs. This is not acting-together, but rather Obama pushing his audience to act out his ideology of hope, ending his introduction of the term on the succinct imperative, “You think about it.” There are other desires Obama wants his supporters to act out: “I want your support in this race,” he proclaims somewhere in the middle of his speech, an admission resulting in further robust cheering. In fact, after commanding the audience to “think about it,” he uses the phrase “I want you to” as an imperative eight separate times, including seven times in approximately two minutes. This is textbook ethos, rooted in a rhetor’s pre-established, i.e., previously created and/or existing, character that appears strong, sanguine, and sedulous (and thus, Aristotle tells us, persuasive). But, again, while this textbook definition of ethos can help explain the (pre)construction of Obama the candidate, its power to explain the audience’s individualized and collectivized receptions of that construction is inadequate, an insufficiency that I will argue is systemic in rhetoric studies.

Another answer for why all that applause is, of course, the content of Obama’s speech, which, though it lacked a substantive programmatic dimension, unsurprising at the start of a campaign, was perhaps affecting and analeptic for a great many audience members. Perhaps people were moved, pathetically, by his words, a contention we cannot discount entirely, but that we can complicate by suggesting that, more than the speech, which was, again, a generally uninformative and typically broad-brushstroke affair, it was the speaker who was affecting. That this is true should not be entirely surprising, given what has already been mentioned about all candidacies ultimately coming down to the candidate. And given that, as a first-term United States senator, Obama has very little substantive foreign and domestic policy to harness for the purposes of ethos building, it is logical that he would harness the one asset readily available: himself. Near the end of his speech, Obama recounts another personal narrative, this one about a “thirty-nine city, five-day tour of southern Illinois ”that he took with United States senior senator Dick Durbin while on the Congressional campaign trail: 

[P]eople were especially skeptical that a black guy named Barack Obama could win in southern Illinois ... And one of the places we went to was a place called Cairo, Illinois [located in the most southerly and westerly county in the state], and for those of you who don't know, Cairo, Illinois, back in the late sixties and early seventies, was the site of some of the worst racial violence of anyplace in the nation, as bad as anything going on in Mississippi and Alabama. I mean there were cross burnings and active white citizen counsels, and black people couldn't get jobs in this town, and ultimately there was civil unrest and the National Guard was called in. And as we are going down to Cairo, he starts telling me the first time he went down there was during this period, and that he was a young lawyer, that he had been called in by the lieutenant governor to see what could be done to improve the racial climate there. So he goes down, takes the train, gets picked up at the depot, it is driven by a volunteer to where he is going to be staying. And before he gets out of the car the volunteer says to him, ‘Listen, young man, whatever you do, don’t use the telephone in your motel room.” And he says, ‘why not?’ ‘Well, the members, the switchboard operator of the motel is a member of the white citizen council and will report on everything that you say.’ So this made him a little nervous, but he goes ahead and he has a job to do, and he starts unpacking his bag…and [Durbin] is really feeling nervous.

And so am I, because he is telling me the story as we are pulling into Cairo.

And so we pulling in and we drive around the county courthouse, and he’s telling me more of these stories, and suddenly we come to a big parking lot, and there are about three hundred people gathered there, and I don't know what they are doing there, but I notice they are all up in [age] where they might have been active participants in what had been going on thirty years ago. But then as we get closer I notice actually about a third of the group is black, and about two-thirds is white, and as we get closer still, I notice they are all wearing these little blue buttons that say ‘Obama for U.S. senate.’

And we get off the van, and they start handing us barbecue, and they start taking pictures, and want autographs, and Durbin and I look at each other and we didn't say anything. We knew what the other person was thinking. If you would have asked Dick Durbin twenty-six years ago when he first went down there that thirty years later he would be coming back the son of a immigrant, father died when he was young, mother got cancer, got scholarships, got his way up, and you told him he would be coming back as a senior of the United States senator, and that he had with him a black guy, born in Hawaii with a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas, named Barack Obama, and that he was the nominee, nobody would have believed it.

But it was happening.

Obama’s Senator Durbin narrative is interesting for reasons similar to his Pastor Wright narrative, most notably the structuring of the narrative: beginning with an initial disengagement of self, i.e., this story is about someone else’s experiences and thoughts, and ending with a (re)centralizing on the self as the story’s focus, i.e., and here’s how I, Barack Obama, incorporated those experiences and thoughts into my construction of myself as a viable candidate. In the former narrative, Wright’s sermon becomes Obama’s vision. And in the latter story, Durbin’s memories of civil strife become Obama’s actuality of civil peace and racial potential. Further, just as Obama situates himself in a presidential genealogy of apotheosis by speaking in front of the “a place where Abraham Lincoln has served,” he situates himself as the culmination of the civil rights movement, the progenitor and beneficiary of that strife. “[N]obody would have believed it,” he testifies, “But if was happening.” “Which reminds me of what Dr. King said two weeks after Bloody Sunday,” he continues:

After the marches had been turned back from the Independence Bridge, beaten, tear-gassed, billy-clubbed, feeling discouraged, Dr. King gathered them together in a church, and he said, ‘Remember, the arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice.’ 

It bends toward justice, but here is the thing, Austin, it doesn't bend on its own; it bends because you bend it in the direction of justice. It is because each of us put our hand on that arc, and we say, ‘we want you,’ ‘we want universal healthcare for all Americans,’ ‘yes, we can.’ ‘We want education for all Americans.’ ‘We will bend it in the direction of justice.’ ‘We want an end to this war, and we want diplomacy, and alliances, and peace.’

Yes, we can.

If all of us put our hand on that arc and bend it in the direction of justice, I am absolutely confident that we can create the kind of

America that our children, our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren deserve. Let's go, Austin, let's get busy, and let's get going.

Thank you.

Even the length of this personal narrative is indicative of Obama’s ethotic centralizing. But, skillfully, the crescendo at the end re-coalesces the desire for acting-together, the “reminds me,” becomes “we want,” “we will,” and, ultimately, “we can.” Acting-together is a key to Obama’s “audacity of hope” ideology; it is precisely the behavior he wants supporters to, at his request, act out, especially since he characterizes himself as, poetically, even if he does seem to protest too much, “an imperfect vessel.” And if, still four weeks away from the general election, the almost three hundred million dollars Obama’s candidacy has raised from a startling one hundred and fifty thousand discrete contributors is an accurate indication, then people’s immediate reactions seem satisfied and sanctioning. But what about people’s perdurable reactions? What gives the ethotic constructions of a candidate their continued potency? Perhaps it is as much about audiences finding candidates affecting because they wanted to find them affecting than it is about candidates actually being so. It’s probably both.

To articulate the main intellectual phenomenon my project, Enduring Character: The Persistence of Ethos and the Problem with Sincerity, seeks to describe, then, what gives ethos its durability; what cognitive motivations and social mechanisms allow ethos sustainability beyond the moment of its initial formulation by the rhetor and application on the audience? Or, put another way, what makes a person who came out on a rainy Friday in early 2007 to hear Obama speak, then go out and vote for Obama twelve and eighteen months later because of what s/he heard and saw? What qualities and characteristics is that audience member taking away from the rhetorical moment (or potentially a series of moments), from where do those qualities initially come, and how and where do those characteristics endure, even if they are not necessarily authentic, but only perceived as such?
___

* Obviously, Obama's February 2007 speech in Austin occurs a year before the controversy surrounding Jeremiah Wright's ideology and Obama's relationship to his, now former, pastor.