Rhetorician in Chief: President Obama's Popular Leadership and American Constitutionalism
While many scholars have assessed President Obama’s rhetoric as it relates to modern liberalism and the American political tradition, or how his rhetoric provides insights concerning his political positions and policy beliefs, no one has fully considered the importance of the constitutional themes a...
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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Dissertation |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Ann Arbor
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
2017
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | While many scholars have assessed President Obama’s rhetoric as it relates to modern liberalism and the American political tradition, or how his rhetoric provides insights concerning his political positions and policy beliefs, no one has fully considered the importance of the constitutional themes and issues that were communicated through his presidential rhetoric. This dissertation fills that gap by providing a detailed examination of President Obama’s constitutional rhetoric. While the use of content analysis of President Obama’s speeches serves as the principal methodology in this dissertation, quantitative data is also presented at times to shed light on the theoretical material being presented. This dissertation addresses two major questions related to President Obama and the rhetorical presidency. First, how did President Obama use his rhetoric to address the nature and meaning of the American constitutional order, and second, did his rhetoric suggest a particular change in interpretation or understanding to the constitutional order? I found that much of President Obama’s constitutional rhetoric mirrors the arguments made about the Constitution by the American Progressives of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. While he did not call for actual changes to the formal structures of the Constitution, he did call for continual renewal of the principles undergirding the Constitution, an approach very consistent with the original progressives themselves. The chapters in this dissertation—analyzing President Obama’s own rhetoric as it relates to his personal philosophy of government, the Separation of Powers, executive power, partisanship, and civic education—elucidate the progressive themes that animate his constitutional rhetoric. |
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| Bibliography: | Politics and Economics. Adviser: Joseph M. Bessette. Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 78-10(E), Section: A. |
| ISBN: | 9781369781731 1369781733 |