The Rhetoric of Heroic Expectations: Establishing the Obama Presidency

Chapter 3. The “We” in “Yes, We Can”: Obama’s Audience, the Audience’s Obama, and Consubstantiality

cHaPTER 3 The “We” in “yes, We can” Obama’s Audience, the Audience’s Obama, and Consubstantiality eric dieter In May 2007, during one of the candidate’s first Sunday-morning interviews , George Stephanopoulos asked Barack Obama what “special qualities”he thought he possessed.1 “I think that I have the capacity to get people to recognize themselves in each other,” Obama responded, echoing statements from his 2006 campaign-priming autobiography.“Not so far beneath the surface,” Obama wrote in The Audacity of Hope, “we are becoming more, not less, alike.” He continued, saying that “across America , a constant cross-pollination is occurring, a not entirely orderly but generally peaceful collision among people and cultures.”2 This “peaceful collision” is presented in his autobiography as a congenital characteristic of the American mind, but his response to Stephanopoulos suggests that what is characteristic is not necessarily habitually acted upon. Someone with a “special” capacity, however, can help Americans accomplish these “cross-pollinations,”allowing them“to recognize themselves in each other.” Institutional Burdens and American Identities An incongruity,however,underlies Obama’s two claims:Why does someone , specifically a presidential candidate (and then a president), need to provoke Americans to become “more, not less, alike” if they are already predisposed to do so? And even if we can provide an adequate answer for the why, how did a presidential candidate like Obama promote shared identity when the contentious trend of contemporary public discourse suggested that Americans, despite any innate character they may possess, were disinclined“to recognize themselves in each other?”Both questions revolve around what seems like another incongruity,namely the relation- The “We” in “yes, We can” : 51 ship between internal,or intrinsic,senses of identity actually (or assumed to be) held by Americans, and external, or extrinsic, idealized identities urged by US leaders. Changing those dual strands of identity—persuadingAmericans either to revise or replace their internal identities with those externally offered and nationally shared—is precisely the sort of “glorious burden” of the presidency that Jennifer Mercieca and Justin Vaughn describe in their introductory chapter to this volume. Of the many “heroic expectations” encumbering the modern presidency,this essay argues that an interesting and complicated one is the reliance of Americans on their president to show them how to beAmerican.More than simply convincingAmericans of any particular policy’s efficacy, presidents are charged with showing them how to hold an American identity and what identity to hold.3 As we will see, such modeling is generally done rhetorically, but it is no less a burden of the institution of the presidency because it does not deal with overt,constitutionally enumerated economic,diplomatic,legislative,and military powers.And despite the burden of using rhetoric to modelAmerican identity for Americans, the modern presidency is also emboldened by this reliance. As Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson point out,“The U.S. Constitution nowhere refers to ‘the presidency’ …”; they conclude,“What we now understand as the presidency has come into being as a result of the actions of all our presidents, a process in which rhetorical practices have been of particular importance.”4 In retrospect, the well-covered (including elsewhere in this volume) popularity of Obama’s 2008 campaign and the decisiveness of his victory offer compelling evidence that he was able, at least throughout the heady days of his campaign and inauguration, to find adequate answers to the two questions stated above.This essay offers a way to read how Obama was able to reconcile the incongruity between internal and external identities through his use of rhetoric, and argues that this reconciliation is largely due to avoiding discussions about identity in favor of those either about or enacting identification. Identification and the Presidency Indeed, Obama’s negotiation of the institutional burden exhibited a comprehension of the rhetorical force found in Kenneth Burke’s “identification .” Identity suggests fixed selfhood, influenced by, among other 52 : ERic diETER things, demographics and psychology, but slow to change on its own and potentially impervious to rhetoric. By contrast, identification, according to Burke, is wholly rhetorical, the persuading of a person“only insofar as you can talk his language by speech,gesture,tonality,order,image,attitude, idea,identifying your ways with his.”5 Identification,by Burke’s definition, requires actors purposefully employing rhetorical acts to move identities closer together and further apart, most often for political reasons. Identification involves identity, of course, but...