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:”
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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