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Behavioral Scientist
The Fierce Urgency of Now: Barack Obama and the 2008 Presidential
Election
Robert C. Rowland
American Behavioral Scientist 2010 54: 203 originally published online 22 September
2010
DOI: 10.1177/0002764210381707
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ABS
Article
The Fierce Urgency of
Now: Barack Obama
and the 2008
Presidential Election
American Behavioral Scientist
54(3) 203­–221
© 2010 SAGE Publications
Reprints and permission: http://www.
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0002764210381707
http://abs.sagepub.com
Robert C. Rowland1
Abstract
This essay uses an analysis of the convention addresses of Barack Obama, John McCain,
and Sarah Palin to explain the development of the 2008 presidential campaign. Obama’s
ultimate appeal can be traced to his call for reconstituting the American Dream to
take care of the entire community. It is his appeal to communitarian values in a time
of growing crisis that explains the enormous movement that his campaign generated.
As the economic crisis worsened in the fall, this message became still more powerful.
In contrast, McCain and Palin ran a campaign based on personality, largely a depiction
of McCain as a hero and of both of them as mavericks. Given their commitment to
utterly traditional conservative policy prescriptions, the maverick theme ultimately
declined in importance, leaving their campaign with no option except strident attack
on Obama as unqualified and out of the mainstream. These attacks ultimately failed in
part because of Obama’s skill at calmly explaining policy positions and also because in
a time of growing crisis they lost resonance.
Keywords
Obama, McCain, American Dream, hero, myth, maverick
The conventional wisdom about the 2008 presidential election evolved over the course
of the primaries, through the nominating conventions, and into the general election. In
the early primary period, it was supposed to be about the power of experience and
1
University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA
Corresponding Author:
Robert C. Rowland, University of Kansas, 102 Bailey Hall, 1440 Jayhawk Blvd., Lawrence, KS 66045-7575
Email: rrowland@ku.edu
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American Behavioral Scientist 54(3)
competence (Nagourney, 2008a, p. P3). With John McCain and Hillary Clinton as the
front-runners in their parties, many thought the campaign would be over by New
Hampshire and that the general election campaign would be decided based on which
candidate the public perceived as more able to clean up the mess of the Bush years
(Thomas, 2009). With the early collapse of the McCain campaign and the rise of what
might be labeled the Obama insurgency in the Democratic primaries, the conventional
wisdom was turned on its head (Thomas, 2009). In this period, the election was all
about change, with nearly every candidate in both parties claiming to be the candidate
of change. Over time, the Obama phenomenon became associated with hope as a transcendent value (Rich, 2009). At the same time, the rebirth of the McCain campaign
was viewed as a sign that the adults were again in charge within the Republican Party,
and many believed that the ultimate campaign issue would be experience (Broder,
2008).
In this essay, I argue that in each case the conventional wisdom was simply wrong
(Rich, 2009). The primary theme of the 2008 presidential campaign can be condensed
in a single phrase that Senator Barack Obama often used in the campaign, “the fierce
urgency of now” (Obama, 2007). Ultimately, it was the urgency of the situation, the
need for action to protect the American Dream, that made Obama’s primary campaign
so effective and that ultimately carried him to the presidency. Late in the campaign,
Mark Danner (2008) summarized his message: “Things are bad now, real bad. Do you
want that to continue or do you want things to get better?” (p. 12). Obama’s message
resonated with the American people throughout the process, but as the situation became
truly desperate in August, September, and October 2008, that resonance grew still stronger (Cooper & Sussman, 2008b; Thee, 2008). Against that message, John McCain and
Sarah Palin, whose ideological perspective had been undercut by the disastrous performance of the Bush administration, had only biography and therefore had no alternative
but to attempt to undermine public perception of Obama as a mainstream and legitimate candidate. The ultimate difficulty with this approach was both that it did not
speak to the urgency of the situation and that Obama’s message and his persona were
almost perfectly aligned with that most basic of American mythic narratives, the
American Dream (Rowland & Jones, 2007). The consequence was that Obama won a
decisive victory, except in places that remained strongly committed to the ideological
agenda of movement conservatism as enacted in the Bush presidency (Drew, 2008;
Tomasky, 2008).
It might seem impossible to condense an analysis of a presidential campaign that
lasted for more than 2 years into a single brief essay. A simple narrative chronology of
the campaign could fill several volumes. In this case, however, the dominant themes
and their relationship to the political situation are present in condensed form in the
nomination acceptance speeches of Obama, McCain, and Sarah Palin at the respective
party conventions. Although Senator Joe Biden’s vice presidential acceptance address
merely restated dominant themes found throughout the Obama campaign, the same
cannot be said of Palin’s address. In fact, as I demonstrate later, the most important
Republican themes were emphasized by Palin, not McCain. Ultimately, the campaign
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reduced itself to the power of Obama’s message about reclaiming the American Dream
in a time of great urgency (by October a true crisis) against the efforts of Palin and
other McCain surrogates to deny that Obama was a “real” American. In developing this
argument, I turn first to Obama’s address in Denver and then to a consideration of the
speeches by McCain and Palin in St. Paul. I then show how the interaction of the themes
in these addresses interacted with the rhetorical situation and resulted in a decisive
victory for Obama.
Reclaiming the American Dream—Obama in Denver
As I noted earlier, one aspect of the conventional wisdom concerning the Obama
campaign was that the emotional resonance of the campaign was all about hope. After
all, Obama again and again spoke of the “audacity of hope” and titled his campaign
book with that phrase (Obama, 2006). There is little doubt that many of his partisans
were driven to work countless hours and raise astonishing amounts of money by their
need for hope for a better future. Memorably, Moveon.org produced a 30-second campaign commercial on this theme showing ordinary people who had found “hope”
(Moveon.org, 2008). Although hope was clearly a major theme in the campaign, it
was, however, not the core of Obama’s message. The difficulty with hope as a theme
unto itself is that it can seem insubstantial (Rich, 2009), a point that Clinton made in
the primaries (McKenna, 2008). Rather than the core of Obama’s message, hope was
the result that the message produced in his audience. It was the emotional reaction that
energized campaign workers and others, but not the primary message. The key question, then, is to consider what it was about his rhetoric that created the sense of hope.
Obama’s convention speech is at its core a problem–solution speech (Obama,
2008). Like all nonincumbents, Obama focused on the problems facing the nation and
how the policies of his administration could address those problems. What made Obama’s
message different and more powerful than that of John Kerry or Al Gore was both the
nature of the problem and the nature of Obama’s solution. In Denver and throughout the
campaign, Obama emphasized the urgency of the situation facing the nation by linking
economic and other problems to the lives of ordinary Americans. Although the policy
prescriptions he proposed largely represented standard liberal dogma, he cloaked them
in the values, characters, and themes associated with the most important American
political myth, the American Dream (Rowland & Jones, 2007). It was Obama’s capacity to show how the problems of the present day were undercutting that dream for
ordinary Americans and then his ability to show that the ultimate solution to those
problems lay in a return to the basic values of the American Dream that energized his
message. In the convention address, Obama consistently moved back and forth between
the problem and solution, the warp and woof of his address, with these threads producing a vision of a reclaimed and strengthened American Dream.
After a gracious introduction in which he strongly praised Senator Clinton, thanked
convention organizers, and expressed love for his family (pars. 2-4), Obama immediately turns to the solution to the crises facing the nation, but he turns to that solution in
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narrative rather than policy terms. Beginning in paragraph 5, he shows how the values
of the American Dream are at the core of his life experience and implicitly argues that
by returning to those values, the present crisis can be solved. He begins with biography,
noting,
Four years ago, I stood before you and told you my story—of the brief union
between a young man from Kenya and a young woman from Kansas who
weren’t well-off or well-known, but shared a belief that in America, their son
could achieve whatever he put his mind to. (par. 5)
He then links his story to the larger national story, stating,
It is that promise that has always set this country apart—that through hard work
and sacrifice, each of us can pursue our individual dreams but still come together
as one American family, to ensure that the next generation can pursue their dreams
as well. (par. 6)
He adds that “for two hundred and thirty two years, at each moment when that promise
was in jeopardy, ordinary men and women—students and soldiers, farmers and teachers, nurses and janitors—found the courage to keep it alive” (par. 7).
I have quoted almost all of paragraphs 5 through 7 because they contain in a nutshell his narrative solution to the problems facing the nation, problems he has not yet
mentioned. The answer to those problems is to return to and reinvigorate the most
basic of American stories, by both working hard and working together. In these three
short paragraphs, Obama distinguished himself from recent Democratic nominees for
president and from McCain and both traditional and movement conservatives. The
basic values implicit in Obama’s narrative are quite traditional: family, hard work, and
community. Although Obama’s educational background placed him among the elites,
the values he emphasized were anything but elitist. In this way, he distinguished himself from Democrats such as Gore and Kerry, who, despite advocating policies quite
similar to those favored by Obama, had difficulty connecting with ordinary citizens.
But Obama also distinguished himself from his Republican opponents with his emphasis on communitarian values. In Obama’s narrative, the nation had a responsibility” to
keep it [the promise of the American Dream] alive” (par. 7), regardless of ideology.
Later in the speech, he outlines any number of specific policy proposals, but undergirding all of them is the narrative theme that Americans can solve any problem
through a commitment to hard work and community. Although his biography was quite
different from previous presidential candidates, the dominant theme in his narrative
was utterly traditional.
After establishing the narrative thread that holds together all of his various proposals
for solving the problems facing the nation, Obama turns to the problems the nation
faced. He begins not with statistics or statements from experts but with the characters
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in his story, ordinary Americans. He labels the situation facing the nation as a “defining
moment” when “the American promise has been threatened once more” (par. 8). How
has it been threatened? “Tonight, Americans are out of work and more are working harder
for less. More of you have lost your homes and even more are watching your home
values plummet” (par. 9). He then links together the problem and solution narrative
themes, noting that the nation faces crises because of a failure to value the entire community: “These challenges are not all of the government’s making. But the failure
to respond is a direct result of a broken politics and the failed policies of George
W. Bush” (par. 1). The failure to respond, the failure to value the entire community as
reflected in both Bush administration policies and a “broken politics,” is the core problem. But by returning to a focus on the entire community, these problems can be solved
because when we work together: “We are a better country than this” (par. 11).
At this point, the two themes, what I earlier called the warp and woof of the address,
have been established. He will weave back and forth between them, first developing
one and then the other, in the remainder of the speech. What unifies them throughout
is that both are linked to the American Dream, what Obama calls the “American promise” (par. 15). Most of the speech is focused on the hole that had been ripped in the
American Dream, the problem portion of the speech, but ultimately it is the solution,
the return to basic values of hard work and community, that explains the resonance
associated with the address and Obama’s campaign more generally.
Beginning in paragraph 12, Obama emphasizes the hole in the American Dream.
He speaks of “a man in Indiana” whose job had been outsourced to China, of veterans
sleeping “on our streets,” of families sliding “into poverty,” and of the drowning of “a
major American city. . . before our eyes” (pars. 13, 14). After praising Senator McCain
for his record of “bravery and distinction,” he attacks his “judgment” for “think[ing]
George Bush has been right more than ninety percent of the time” (par. 17). In the following paragraphs, he makes clear that the failure in judgment is that McCain and by
extension the Republican Party are not concerned with the entire community, but only
the rich. He ridicules McCain for defining “middle-class as someone making under
five million dollars a year” and links this viewpoint to the “discredited Republican
philosophy—give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity
trickles down” (pars. 20, 22). The ultimate failure of this policy is that it says to all
Americans, “You’re on your own” (par. 22).
Like a weaver going back and forth on the loom, Obama then returns to the theme
that the problems can be solved with a focus on the entire community, noting that
“Democrats have a very different measure of what constitutes progress in this country” (par. 24). In the following seven paragraphs he speaks in general terms of what
can be done if you value the entire community, of families that “can find a job that
pays the mortgage,” of veterans who after serving their country can earn “the chance
to go to college,” and also of people still needing help. He says that these ordinary
people “are my heroes. Theirs are the stories that shaped me. And it is on their behalf
that I intend to win this election and keep our promise alive as President of the United
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States” (par. 32). In Obama’s narrative, ordinary people are desperately hurting, but
the solution to their pain is not complex, but simple. It is simply to embrace values
and therefore policies that protect the entire community, values and polices that
enact the American Dream.
Obama most fully develops his vision of the American Dream at the end of the first
third of the speech, when he uses a rhetorical question “What is that promise?” (par. 33)
to set up his vision of a better nation. He says, “It’s a promise that says each of us has the
freedom to make of our own lives what we will, but that we also have the obligation
to treat each other with dignity and respect” (par. 34). He adds that it “is a promise that
says government cannot solve all our problems, but what it should do is that which we
cannot do for ourselves—protect us from harm” (par. 36). Here, Obama embraces both
the individualistic and the communitarian variants of the American Dream (Rowland
& Jones, 2007), balancing them against each other. Unlike many liberals, he does not
place all of the emphasis on government but, unlike conservatives, says that the radical
individualism present in a market-based approach to government is not enough. He
states this balance most clearly in paragraphs 37 and 38:
Our government should work for us, not against us. It should help us, not hurt
us. It should ensure opportunity not just for those with the most money and
influence, but for every American who is willing to work.
That’s the promise of America—the idea that we are responsible for ourselves, but that we also rise or fall as one nation; the fundamental belief that I am
my brother’s keeper; I am my sister’s keeper.
These two paragraphs distinguish Obama as a different kind of Democrat but also
distinguish him from the heroic individualism implicit in Ronald Reagan’s (1989,
p. 61) famous statement in his inaugural address that government was the problem,
not the solution.
To this point, Obama has sketched with broad strokes the threat to the American
Dream and his way to revive it. Beginning with paragraph 39, he spells “out exactly
what” he stands for. In the following 30 paragraphs, he details policies that any mainstream Democrat would support. In the period leading to the convention, a number of
commentators called on Obama to flesh out his policy prescriptions for the nation
(“Mr. Obama’s Moment,” 2008). It is in this passage that he does so. What the commentators missed, however, is that it was not primarily innovative policies that made
Obama a successful candidate. It was the underlying narrative with which he defended
those policies. Obama returns to that narrative in paragraph 70, where he speaks of the
importance of finding common ground to reduce “the number of unwanted pregnancies,” keep “AK-47s out of the hands of criminals,” and make certain that “our gay and
lesbian brothers and sisters” can “visit the person they love in the hospital.” Even the
most divisive problems may be confronted with a focus on the entire community, what
he calls “the promise of a democracy where we can find the strength and grace to
bridge divides and unite in common effort” (par. 70).
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Against this “promise,” Obama warns his audience that “if you don’t have any fresh
ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare the voters.” “You make a big election about
small things” (pars. 71, 72). But although this tactic of dividing the community has
“worked before,” it will not work now “because all across America something is stirring” (pars. 73, 75). Obama then uses his campaign and his own life as the very enactment of the promise associated with the American Dream, saying that he knows that “the
change we need is coming. Because I’ve seen it. Because I’ve lived it” (par. 78). It is the
American spirit—that American promise—that pushes us forward even when the
path is uncertain; that binds us together in spite of our differences; that makes us
fix our eye not on what is seen, but what is unseen, that better place around the
bend. (par. 81)
The narrative theme of progress that is at the heart of the American Dream “is our greatest inheritance,” a “promise that I make to my daughters when I tuck them in at night”
and “a promise that has led immigrants to cross oceans and pioneers to travel west” and
that “forty five years ago today” caused “a young preacher from Georgia [to] speak of
his dream” (pars. 82, 83). Although the American Dream is threatened by those who
use “words of anger and discord” to tell us “to succumb to the fear and frustrations of
so many dreams deferred,” it can be redeemed as long as we remember that the destiny
of “people of every creed and color” “is inextricably linked” (pars. 84, 85). The solution
to the crises facing the nation is to act as one community to confront them.
The final paragraph before Obama thanks the audience for their attention contains
in condensed form both the solution and the problem. As with the organization of the
entire speech, he begins with the solution, telling the nation, “America, we cannot turn
back,” before citing problems in education, services for veterans, and the economy. He
then returns to the solution, a reinvigoration of the American Dream that embraces the
entire community, stating, “We cannot walk alone” but must “pledge once more to march
into the future” (par. 87).
In the time of economic crisis, the address could have been criticized for falling
short in presenting a specific plan for addressing the nation’s ills. Alternatively, it
might have been critiqued as poorly organized for weaving back and forth between the
problem and solution sections of the address. This analysis of the speech suggests that
those criticisms would be misguided. Although in the address Obama discussed any
number of specific policies, he did not provide great detail on any of them. What
Obama understood is that great movements are energized by large themes linked to
basic values and shared identity. The speech was in fact tightly organized around a
narrative in which the promise of a better life implicit in the American Dream was
gravely threatened by a host of problems, but the ultimate solution to those problems
was not complex policy. Rather, it was simply a return to the core of the dream narrative itself. By focusing on the entire community, the nation could solve the quite
urgent problems confronting us and produce hope for a better future. Hope was not the
core message of the speech; it was the product of it.
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McCain and Palin: The Hero and the Hockey Mom
In retrospect, it is clear that Senator John McCain faced a steep uphill climb in his
contest with Obama. Polling data during the general election campaign made it apparent that the country was increasingly unhappy with the status of the economy, the direction that the nation was moving, and the Bush administration. Several polls found that
more than 80% of the people believed the nation was on the wrong track, and as a
consequence “the fundamentals of the race favored Obama all along” (Drew, 2008,
p. 95). Moreover, a variety of indicators suggested that the conservative ideological
dominance since the Reagan years was coming to an end (Borosage, 2008; Tomasky,
2008). Polls and other data indicated growing doubts about conservative policy prescriptions and a sense that government action was needed on a variety of fronts (Rich,
2008b). This political situation sharply constrained McCain’s options.
To make matters worse, although McCain had the reputation as a “maverick,” his
overall voting record was reliably conservative (Lelyveld, 2008; Rich, 2008a). Under
attack in the primary campaign from the most conservative wing of the Republican
Party, McCain was forced to downplay or renounce his stands on the relatively few
issues, such as immigration, where he differed from party orthodoxy (Rich, 2008a).
Ironically, despite a solidly conservative voting record over many years in the Senate,
some movement conservatives still doubted McCain’s commitment to conservative
principles (Lelyveld, 2008). Thus, McCain faced the double bind of needing to reassure conservatives of his support for their viewpoint at a time when the nation as a
whole was increasingly skeptical of this viewpoint. To this difficult situation add an
unpopular incumbent, an unpopular war, and growing economic distress and the magnitude of the problem facing McCain becomes apparent.
In this situation, McCain had two possible options. Although some encouraged him
to run as a true maverick, this was not really a possibility. Such an approach would
have alienated his base, which remained deeply skeptical of his commitment to conservative orthodoxy. At a time when the Democratic base was both extremely activated and organized, low turnout among core Republican voters obviously would have
doomed McCain. Thus, McCain’s only possible approach was to focus his campaign
on biography and undercutting the legitimacy of Obama as a candidate. Both of these
approaches would be evident in St. Paul.
A Hero and a Maverick
The political and rhetorical constraints facing McCain are quite evident in his nomination acceptance speech in St. Paul. Two points are obvious in the policy portion of the
speech. First, there is not very much of it. Of the 66-paragraph speech, only roughly
one quarter outlines policies for responding to the problems facing the nation. Second,
those policies were essentially a continuation of the Bush agenda. McCain (2008)
describes his core policy positions in two short paragraphs at the end of the first third
of the speech:
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We believe in low taxes; spending discipline, and open markets. We believe in
rewarding hard work and risk takers and letting people keep the fruits of their labor.
We believe in a strong defense, work, faith, service, a culture of life, personal
responsibility, the rule of law, and judges who dispense justice impartially and
don’t legislate from the bench. We believe in the values of families, neighborhoods and communities. (pars. 24, 25)
Here, McCain embraces the antitax policies of small government conservatism, along
with opposition to abortion and judicial activism and support for a strong defense. In
the remainder of the speech, he develops a very few of these ideas in more detail. For
example, he outlines a set of tax cuts for individuals and businesses and expanded
deductions to improve health care (pars. 27-29). Without providing any policy details, he
calls for expanding choice in education, including more charter schools (pars. 31-34). He
calls for achieving energy independence and attacks Obama for not supporting increased
drilling for oil and natural gas (pars. 35, 36). He defends the surge in Iraq and also calls
for continuing to confront Al-Qaeda (pars. 15, 16, 39).
Although some suggested that Obama did not present an adequately detailed outline of the policies that his administration would support in his convention address, in
comparison to McCain his speech read like a policy paper from a liberal think tank. It
is not merely that McCain did not spend much time on policy but that the policies he
endorsed were both traditionally conservative and a continuation of the ideological
agenda of the Bush administration. As I explained earlier, arguing for a third Bush term
was not a winning political strategy.
Rather than the centerpiece of the address, the policy section was simply a required
element in the genre of convention acceptance addresses (Medhurst, 2009). The core
of the speech was McCain’s presentation of himself as a maverick and a hero. Early in
the speech, the focus is on McCain and Palin as mavericks. In paragraphs 10 to 12, he
reminds the audience of Palin’s life story as a way of setting up the maverick theme:
I’m not in the habit of breaking promises to my country and neither is Governor
Palin. And when we tell you we’re going to change Washington, and stop leaving our country’s problems for some unluckier generation to fix, you can count
on it. (par. 12)
McCain then extends the theme that as a “maverick” who “marches to the beat of his
own drum,” who has “fought corruption,” “big spenders,” “lobbyists, “tobacco companies and trial lawyers, drug companies, and union bosses” (pars. 13, 14) he will be
able to serve the people. He then cites the sole example of a particular policy that he
supported as a maverick, the successful implementation of the surge in Iraq. He follows this by using the phrase “I fight for” (pars. 7-20) to introduce a list of particular
people he met in the campaign for whom he will fight. Here, he is attempting to link
his campaign to the lives of ordinary people around the country who are suffering in
the economic downturn.
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The difficulty with McCain’s portrayal of himself as a “maverick” is evident in
paragraph 22 when he reminds the convention of his orthodox conservative credentials,
stating, “The party of Lincoln, Roosevelt and Reagan is going to get back to basics”
(par. 22). The problem here is that unlike Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt,
McCain supported policies that were completely conventional, essentially a continuation of the previous 8 years. There had been a time when McCain was truly a maverick
in his party on issues such as immigration, tobacco, climate change, and campaign
finance, but by the St. Paul convention the only ongoing policy that he could cite as
proof of his status as a maverick was support for the surge. Even on that topic, there
was a problem. Although by the summer of 2008 the surge had clearly succeeded in a
military sense, the war in Iraq remained deeply unpopular and the public favored
Obama’s position over that of McCain (Cooper & Sussman, 2008a, p. A18).
Thus, although McCain and Palin consistently emphasized their identity as a pair of
mavericks, this strategy had a major drawback. They were mavericks in a stylistic but
not a policy sense. In a time of economic boom that might have been enough, but in a
time of genuine crisis it was not. The persona of “maverick” was almost entirely without content, a point that the comedian Tina Fey memorably pointed out when she satirized Governor Palin for supporting the policy of getting “maverick-y” (Sweet, 2008).
Rather than the role of maverick, the core of McCain’s appeal was as a hero.
McCain mentions his family’s commitment to serving the nation in paragraphs 5 and
41 and then focuses on his own heroism, beginning in paragraph 49. In a moving passage, he describes how as a naval pilot in the Vietnam War he had been shot down,
captured, and then tortured. He tells the story about how after particularly vicious
torture “they broke me” and of how he then fought back (pars. 54, 55). According to
McCain, this experience changed him:
I fell in love with my country when I was a prisoner in someone else’s. I loved
it not just for the many comforts of life here. I loved it for its decency; for its
faith in the wisdom, justice and goodness of its people. I loved it because it was
not just a place, but an idea, a cause worth fighting for. I was never the same
again. I wasn’t my own man anymore. I was my country’s. (par. 56)
He follows this emotional passage with a long section in which he explains how his
experience has led him to fight for his country. He concludes with seven short paragraphs in which he calls on his audience to “fight for” or “stand up” for the nation
(pars. 60-66).
The roughly one sixth of the address in which McCain describes how his experiences in Vietnam have shaped his life and will shape his presidency is clearly the
emotional center of the speech. McCain’s ultimate argument is that he proved his
heroism in Vietnam and the nation can count on him to do that again no matter how
tough the times. As John Judis (2008) observed, “He was running on heroism” (p. 14).
It was a powerful theme and one echoed in all of the other major addresses at the convention (Giuliani, 2008; Huckabee, 2008; Romney, 2008). The underlying difficulty
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was that his status as a hero, something that was nearly always recognized by Obama
and other Democrats in their comments about him, did not change the fact that he supported a continuation of the unpopular policies of the previous 8 years.
The Pit Bull
Although she was not the presidential nominee and prior to the Republican convention was not well known to the American people, in many ways Governor Sarah Palin
was the key figure in the McCain presidential campaign. As I explained in relation to
McCain’s acceptance address, McCain faced grave difficulties in presenting an ideological critique of Obama. This left him few options but to wage a personality driven
campaign focused on a narrative depicting himself as both a maverick and a hero. But
such a focus on personality could go only so far given the difficult ideological and
economic climate. The only remaining option was to strongly attack Obama to disqualify
him in the minds of the American people. Although polling and other data indicate
that ultimately the choice of Palin as the vice presidential nominee cost the ticket
votes (Nagourney, 2008b; Scott, 2008; Tanenhaus, 2008), she was the perfect selection to carry out the only rhetorical strategy available to the campaign, sharp attack on
Obama. She consistently enunciated both halves of the McCain message: the narrative
of McCain as maverick and hero and the strong attack on Obama as not qualified for
the presidency. As has been common in many presidential campaigns, in her role as
vice presidential nominee Palin acted as the primary attack dog for the campaign. She
also brought enormous excitement to the race (Goodman, 2008a; Lelyveld, 2008) and
by all accounts “energized a GOP political base that was becoming ho-hum about
McCain’s candidacy” (Scott, 2008, p. B9). In fact, she drew much larger crowds than
did McCain when he campaigned without her (Zernike & Davey, 2008), leading Mark
Danner (2008) to refer to her as McCain’s “superstar consort” (p. 16). In that way, Palin’s
rhetoric is the best reflection of the overall strategy of the campaign. And far and
away the best source for considering her appeal is the convention speech, which overnight transformed her into a “rock star” in the conservative movement (Danner, 2008).
Palin’s convention speech focuses almost exclusively on the narrative themes that
she and McCain are mavericks, McCain is a hero, and Obama is not fit to be president.
It is striking in the 55-paragraph speech that there is essentially no discussion of
the program that McCain offered the nation. In Palin’s rhetoric, everything reduces to
personality, and the few mentions of policy issues function as anecdotes to support the
personality-based themes in the speech.
There are two heroes in Palin’s speech: Palin and McCain. Unlike Obama’s rhetoric, ordinary Americans barely appear, except to illustrate McCain’s heroism or Palin’s
role as a maverick. The theme that McCain is a hero who can be trusted is emphasized
at both the beginning and the end of the speech. In the second paragraph she praises
McCain as a man “who has come through much harder missions and met far graver
challenges” than those found in a presidential campaign. She then says that those who
“wrote him off” “overlooked the caliber of the man himself” and did not recognize that
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“there’s a time for politics and a time for leadership” (pars. 4, 5). In an allusion to John
Kennedy, she labels McCain “a true profile in courage” for keeping “faith with those
troops in Iraq who now have brought victory within sight” (par. 7). She returns to
this theme in the conclusion of the speech, where she labels McCain as the only “man
in this election who has ever really fought for you in places where winning means
survival and defeat death” (par. 50). She praises McCain as a man who endured the
“pain and squalor of a six-by-four cell” and learned “the wisdom that comes even to
captives,” a man who kept telling fellow prisoners, “‘We’re going to pull through
this’” (pars. 50-53). The presence of the McCain as hero theme in the introduction and
the conclusion of Palin’s address indicates the centrality of the theme in the campaign.
At the end of the day, for McCain to win the presidency, his campaign had to persuade
the American people that his prior heroism proved that he could lead the nation out of
the current crisis.
Although the McCain as hero theme dominates the introduction and the conclusion
of the address, the bulk of the speech focuses on a description of Palin and McCain as
mavericks and a quite strident attack on Obama as not only unqualified but also unfit to
be president. Palin uses her life story to create a persona as an ordinary person who got
involved in government, fought against special interests, and had made a great difference in Alaska. She begins with the personal, talking about her family, especially a son
about to deploy to Iraq, a newborn son who is a special needs child, and her husband
who is a commercial fisherman, a “world champion snow machine racer” and ever
since high school, “my guy” (pars. 9, 20, 12, 14). With these passages, Palin depicts
herself as an ordinary mom who cares about her family. The service of one son in the
military and the fact that she took the other son to term, although she knew that he had
a genetic defect, proved her credentials to the wings of the party focused on the military
and abortion. She then moves to a discussion of her government service, a discussion
she introduces by comparing her path in government to that of Democratic President
Harry Truman. She speaks of serving on the PTA, of becoming mayor of her hometown, of not being a member “of the permanent political establishment,” and later of
taking on “the lobbyists, and the Big Oil companies, and the good-old boys” (pars. 17,
22, 24, 27). She said “Thanks, but no thanks on that Bridge to Nowhere” and “broke
their monopoly [that of lobbyists] on power and resources” (pars. 31, 32). Although she
uses the word maverick only once, in a reference to McCain as “the maverick of the
Senate” (par. 48), she clearly uses the narrative of her own life to describe herself as
another maverick who is ready to work with John McCain.
In this narrative, public policy is reduced to personality. For example, Palin supports her status as a maverick by speaking of how she had taken on “Big Oil” to fill
“up the state treasury” (par. 32), but the Republican Party was strongly opposed to
increased taxes on or regulation of the energy industries. In fact, her actions in Alaska
dealing with Big Oil and lobbyists were more consistent in an ideological sense with
the Obama platform than that of McCain. This makes clear the nonideological nature
of Palin’s appeal. Implicitly, she emphasized that her appeal was based on personality,
rather than policy, when she said of herself that she “was just your average hockey
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mom” and then added, “You know, they say the difference between a hockey mom
and a pit bull? Lipstick” (par. 19). Here she is playing the role of an outsider who can
transform politics through the strength of her character, her common sense, and her
roots as an ordinary person.
Palin was more successful than McCain in presenting herself as a maverick, in
large part because she was a fresh face on the national stage. Her lack of experience
became, for a time, a rhetorical advantage because she was not tainted by long service
in the government. In the early days of her candidacy, her ability to present herself as
the ultimate maverick, the ordinary person who could make a difference, brought
enormous attention to the campaign. Over time, however, the luster of the “hockey
mom” would fade and only the pit bull would remain.
For the reasons explained earlier, the most important theme in Palin’s speech was the
attack on Obama as unfit to be president. Early in the speech she focused on Obama’s
lack of experience, noting,
Since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that
experience, let me explain to them what the job [of being a small town mayor]
involved. I guess a small town mayor is sort of like a community organizer,
except that you have actual responsibilities. (pars. 21, 22)
Here, she implicitly argues that Obama lacks the experience to be president and contrasts him to McCain, who of course had been in the Congress for decades. Palin deve­
lops this theme later when she labels Obama as a man who gives “dramatic speeches,”
“a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or even a reform”
(par. 34). In the conclusion, she says that “a gifted speaker can inspire with his words.
But for a lifetime, John McCain has inspired with his deeds” (pars. 38, 39, 54). In Palin’s
narrative, Obama is “a man of mere words” (Shribman, 2008), whereas McCain is a
man of heroism and action.
Underlying Palin’s attack on Obama’s qualification is an undertone of anger, a feeling that Obama has not earned the right to be president and that he is both arrogant and
presumptuous. This is especially apparent in her sarcastic reference to “those Styrofoam
Greek columns” and the “cloud of rhetoric” from his convention speech (par. 39). She
drives this point home with a rhetorical question, asking, “What does he actually seek
to accomplish after he’s done turning back the waters and healing the planet?” (par. 39).
This question caused Republican faithful to roar, but it also underscored a weakness in
Palin’s attack. It is worth remembering that conservatives never critiqued Ronald
Reagan for being rhetorically skillful.
Although Palin’s charge that Obama was merely “a gifted speaker” and lacked
the experience or accomplishments to be president was important, of greater importance was her attack on Obama as unpatriotic and out of the mainstream. She claims
that he wants “to reduce the strength of American in a dangerous world” and “is a man
who can give an entire speech about the wars America is fighting and never use the
word ‘victory,’ except when he’s talking about his own campaign” and later adds that
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Obama “wants to forfeit” victory in Iraq (pars. 39, 40, 41). She accuses him of weakness
on terrorism, saying that he is willing to meet terrorist states such as Iran “without preconditions” and that rather than confronting Al-Qaeda, he is “worried that someone
won’t read them their rights” (pars. 41, 42). Here, Palin’s focus is not primarily on policy
but on personality. She is not saying that Obama’s foreign policy is unwise but that
Obama is soft on terrorism. Essentially, she is saying that he is weak and unpatriotic.
Palin is similarly strident in her attacks on domestic policy. She claims that Obama
believes that “the answer is to make government bigger, and take more of your money,
and give you more orders from Washington,” that he is “against producing” more
energy and wants to “grow” government and “raise” taxes (pars. 40, 41, 43, 44). Palin’s
comments were hardly a nuanced critique, and many commentators noted that she
either oversimplified or frankly mischaracterized Obama’s positions (“Politics of
Attack,” 2008). But the point of her remarks was not to begin a policy debate on which
nominee’s position would best serve the nation. Rather, she was attempting to label
Obama as someone who was out of the mainstream and therefore could not be considered for the presidency. She was trying to disqualify Obama with a strategy similar to
what that had been used successfully on Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry.
There is no question about the impact of Palin’s convention speech. She became an
instant political star, drew enormous crowds, and energized the McCain campaign
(Goodman, 2008a). But at the core of her appeal were two fundamental weaknesses.
First, Palin had almost nothing to say about the various crises facing the nation. For a
time, her persona as the “hockey mom” who had gone to Anchorage to straighten out
state government might create a public sensation, but over time the enormous problems facing the nation inevitably would pull the public back to a focus on the core
programs of the two parties and how they might make things better. Second, although
Palin’s freshness made her enormously appealing, it also was a substantial vulnerability because she had no experience on the national stage and, outside energy policy,
almost no experience with the key issues that faced the nation. Her attack on Obama
as inexperienced and unqualified exposed her to stronger attacks on the same grounds.
This vulnerability would become a crucial liability for McCain when Palin performed
poorly in media interviews and the vice presidential debate (Goodman, 2008a; “Palin
and McCain Interview,” 2008) and when she was satirically savaged by Tina Fey on
Saturday Night Live. As the campaign progressed, more and more people questioned
her experience and competence, dragging McCain down in the polls (Cooper & Sussman,
2008a, p. A1).
Conclusion
In many ways, the 2008 election campaign was not a fair rhetorical fight. McCain had
to overcome an unpopular president, an unpopular war, the sense that the country was
moving in the wrong direction, and an ideological swing toward support for a more
activist government. As Adam Nagourney (2008a) observed, McCain “fought the
headwinds of a relentlessly hostile political environment, weighted down with the
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baggage left to him by President Bush and an economic collapse” (p. A1). To make
matters worse, his opponent, Senator Barack Obama, had enormous political skills,
especially an ability to energize huge audiences with his speeches and other rhetoric.
Obama’s rhetorical gifts included a capacity to explain complex problems in simple
terms and a facility with language matched by only a very few presidential candidates
in American history. More fundamentally, however, it was not how he said it that mattered most but what he said. What he said throughout the campaign as exemplified in
the analysis here of the convention speech was that the most basic aim of American
life, the idea that the life of each generation would be better than the one that preceded
it, was threatened. According to Obama, the most fundamental American political
story, the American Dream, was threatened with disaster but could be reenergized by
placing a focus on the entire community, as opposed to only one portion of it. Rather
than placing his focus on public policy or on attacks on his opponents, topics he certainly covered in his speeches, Obama placed his primary focus on two narrative
themes related to the American Dream. The first theme emphasized the way that the
lives of ordinary Americans were being devastated by the policies enacted in the Bush
years. The second theme described an alternative future in which all of the citizens of
the nation worked together to make a better world. It was as part of that second theme
that Obama talked about policy change. Unlike Democrats such as Kerry and Gore,
Obama used a discussion of policy to support the underlying narrative that dominated
his campaign rather than basing his campaign on the policy argument itself. It is this
rhetorical tactic that so energized his following.
Given the situation and Obama’s retelling of the American Dream as a means of
producing hope for a better future, McCain had few options. He could not base his
campaign on policy or ideology because the public had grave doubts about those positions. In this context, his only alternative was to run on a rhetoric of personality and
attack. Both of these tactics were evident in the convention speeches of McCain and
especially Palin. The dominant strategy was to depict McCain as a true hero and to label
Obama as unqualified, unpatriotic, and out of the mainstream. Although the press
made much of the efforts of McCain and Palin to depict themselves as mavericks, this
strategy faced the difficulty that by the summer of 2008 John McCain was anything
but a maverick. He was a traditional conservative Republican. Therefore, the ultimate
pivot point on which the campaign swung was the question of whether Republican
attacks could undercut Obama’s image to the point that the public would turn to the
hero, John McCain.
Clearly, the efforts to deny the legitimacy of Obama as a candidate failed. In part,
the efforts failed because in policy terms Obama was simply a mainstream liberal. But
they also failed because the more strident the attack on Obama, the more the attack
revealed his calm persona. It was hard to scare the American people into believing as
Sarah Palin and others argued that Obama was soft on terrorism and supported socialism (Bumiller & Healy, 2008; Danner, 2008) when Obama, with what Elizabeth Drew
(2008, p. 93) called his “preternatural calm,” was so skillful in explaining the rationale
behind his positions (Seelye, 2008). It is notable that race ended up being a much less
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significant factor in the campaign than had been feared (Drew, 2008; Goodman, 2008b;
Zernike & Sussman, 2008). Race mattered less than many pundits had thought because
Obama’s message transcended the issue. He described a better future for all Americans.
It also seems likely that in a time of severe economic crisis for millions of voters the
race of the candidate was less important than the plan for a better future that the candidate offered.
Fundamentally, the scare tactics failed because of the “fierce urgency of now.”
As the campaign progressed and the problems facing the nation became more and
more evident, attacks on Obama for associating with a 1960s terrorist or a radical
minister lost potency. At the same time, the worsening times reinforced Obama’s
call to reinvigorate the American Dream (Drew, 2008; Tomasky, 2008). If the problems of the moment had been less urgent, it is possible that the attacks on Obama
might have had more resonance. But in a time of steep economic decline, they simply seemed beside the point. And in “a time of crisis,” McCain’s narrative of heroism “was a story with roots sunk too deeply in the past for this moment” (Suskind,
2008, p. 55). Of course, Obama’s rhetorical strategy did not produce support everywhere. But outside areas of the country that continued to support the policies of the
Bush administration, it produced a massive win and a huge majority in the electoral
college (“For Most,” 2008).
Obama’s successful invocation of the American Dream in the 2008 campaign suggests three additional important conclusions. First, the fear of Al-Qaeda and more
broadly terrorism that had driven much of American politics after 9/11 was no longer
the overwhelming force that it had been in earlier elections. It was not that fear was no
longer a powerful force in the campaign but that the country was now more fearful of
where it seemed to be going at the end of the Bush years than of anything that bin
Laden could do to the nation. Second, there are limits to the power of negative campaigning. Unlike 2000 and 2004 when Republicans undercut the image of Vice
President Gore and Senator John Kerry with personal attacks of various kinds, in 2008
these attacks, even the quite strident ones issued by Sarah Palin, drew little blood. Nor
did attempts to label Obama as soft on terrorism or a socialist have much effect. As the
economic crisis facing the nation worsened, the attacks lost their resonance. Just as
there are no atheists in foxholes, apparently there are far fewer opponents of government action in a serious recession than at other times.
Finally, Obama’s success suggests the hunger for a new kind of politics. Millions
of Americans responded strongly to Obama not merely because he could give a good
speech but more broadly because of the vision he offered of a society in which all
would once more have the opportunity to build a better life. It was not that he talked
so much about hope but that those listening to him found hope welling up in their own
hearts. Thus, it was the combination of Obama’s communitarian reinvigoration of the
American Dream with a fiercely urgent situation that made his rhetoric so successful
and ultimately resulted in his winning the presidency.
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Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interests with respect to the authorship and/or
publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this
article.
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Bio
Robert C. (Robin) Rowland is a professor in and director of graduate studies of communication studies at the University of Kansas (KU). He received his BA with highest distinction from
the KU, where he and his debate colleague were the 1976 National Debate Champions. He
received his MA at Northwestern University, before returning to KU to complete his PhD. He
taught rhetoric, argumentation, and debate for 5 years at Baylor University, where one of his
teams won the 1987 National Debate Tournament. Since returning to KU in 1987, he has
focused his research on the way that symbols (primarily language, but also other forms of symbolism) shape society. He has published three books, including Shared Land/Conflicting
Identity: Symbolic Trajectories of Israeli and Palestinian Symbol Use (with David Frank, 2002),
which won the top national award for rhetorical criticism, the Kohrs-Campbell Prize, as well as
more than 60 articles and book chapters. He received the Outstanding Faculty Member Award
his last year at Baylor and has received a number of significant teaching awards at KU including, among others, the W.T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence, the Louise E. Byrd
Graduate Educator Award, the H. Bernard Fink Award for Outstanding Classroom Teaching,
and the J. Michael Young Academic Advisor Award. He is a two-time finalist for the teaching award
given annually by the senior class, the HOPE award, and served as chair of the Communication
Studies Department for a decade, from 1999 to 2009.
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