Invention as Intervention in the Rhetoric of Barack Obama

The terms "narrative" and "story" often recur in the vast and still rapidly growing research into the rhetoric of former US president Barack Obama. Although not surprising in itself—even prior to Obama's presidency, numerous scholars identified storytelling as "the essence of American presidential leadership, and the secret of presidential success" (Cornog 2004: 1)—the omnipresence, the impact, and the diversity of the stories told by and about Obama have turned investigations of such narratives not into an optional but an integral part of most accounts of the distinctive features of the communicative strategies Obama employed during his two terms as president. As Molly Andrews notes, "the strategic use of political storytelling is a hallmark of the Obama presidency, and has been applied in virtually every key moment when he has needed to get his message across to the American people" (2014: 85). Readings have focused on how Obama makes use of his personal biography (Medhurst 2009; Hammack 2010); how he retells existing master plots or social myths in American society, such as American exceptionalism, the American dream, or ideas of American national identity (Rowland and Jones 2007; Ivie and Giner 2009; Hammer 2010; Murphy 2011); and how he uses others' personal narratives, often weaving these together with cultural master plots as well as with autobiographical material (Andrews 2014; Iversen and Pers-Højholt, forthcoming).

It is notable that, despite the mapping of how Obama shaped ideas and values and negotiated ideologies through the use of personal and cultural narratives, there has been no systematic analysis of how he used narratives based in the overtly invented and imagined as part of his communicative strategy. This article is concerned with the logic and affordances of these specific narratives embedded in Obama's rhetoric. What we wish to highlight is the fact that prior to and during his presidency, Obama quite often used the overtly invented and imagined to motivate actual interventions. He frequently talked about the non-actual and the non-true in a manner not aimed to deceive but constructed to invite listeners to understand that he talks about the non-actual, with the intention of shaping the beliefs and actions of his audience.

Existing research that has some affinity to our endeavor because, broadly speaking, it concerns various ideas of the forms and functions of what is referred to as "fiction" in Obama's rhetoric may be generally said to subscribe to one of three very different ideas about what fiction is. The first is that the invented or the imaginary belongs to one or more genres of fiction, distinct from the genres of, say, political discourse. Drawing on this idea, several have analyzed how Obama, an avid consumer of American, European, and African fiction, was inspired by, and at times even borrowed from, existing works of literature and movies (Kloppenberg 2011; Ferrara 2013). The second holds that fiction or fictionalization should be considered synonymous with any act of bringing things together in a semiotic construct (e.g., "a narrative persona is fictionalized in the act of sorting through the events of the past and selectively reconstituting them" [Ferrara 2013: 126]).¹ The third equates fiction with lies.

In contrast to these three ideas of invented discourse, we suggest using the term "fictionality" to describe instances of communication that overtly invite the audience to consider the communicated as invented. This makes it possible to consider imaginative discourse as something not restricted to generic fiction and as something distinct from any act of construction, as well as distinct from falsely pretending to be speaking the truth. From this it also follows that fictionalized discourse, as we understand it, is not tied solely to satirical, ironic, or humorous types of discourse. A growing body of work investigates how Obama used different forms of humor as well as the ideological implications of this use (see Waisanen 2015; Becker and Waisanen 2017; Isaksen 2017). Although some of the cases addressed by that research coincide with some of the cases we consider, important differences exist: the use of humor is...